MDM Trouble Report for 2009 Jul 5

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Mark Reynolds (UofM)
Instrument: TIFKAM

Problem(s) Encountered:
I had a number of problems during guiding in the latter half of the night.

When guiding with TIFKAM, after a few dithers the ra/dec encoders would become unresponsive.
The ra would quickly become active again; however, the dec encoder would remain stuck.
The dec was labelled as being at GUIDE2 as opposed to GUIDE or IDLE by the tcs.

I could not fix this problem and had to observe around the problem which would correct itself
in 5 - 20 mins.

Later in the night I also started losing tracking simultaneously with the above problem, the ra & dec system appeared to 
be locking up. This would stop after a minute or two, I tried turning off tracking/drives/auto guider and maybe 
this helped solve the problem although this was not clear to me.   

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Submitted on 2009 Jul 6 [5:36:14]