MDM Trouble Report for 2010 Aug 31

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Grier & Molina (OSU)
Instrument: CCDS

Problem(s) Encountered:
We were unable to use the guider the entire night so we ended up just keeping a close eye on the CCDS Acquisition camera in order to guide. 

When we started guiding on a star, the telescope would get shoved off of the star almost immediately, pulling our object way off of the slit and the guide star way out of the box. We tried changing 
a few of the guiding parameters, as suggested by several notes that have been left near the guide monitor. Changing the DEC guide rate to 4.0 helped a little bit-- the star stayed in 
the box for a longer time before it was pulled out. We then tried fixing the RA guide rate as well, which again seemed to help it stay longer, but the telescope was still bouncing back and forth quite 
a bit and eventually began to overcorrect itself and lost the star entirely every single time. The stars we were trying to guide on all had plenty of counts and were not saturated, so there should not have been any issues. After trying several different 
configurations of guide parameters, we gave up and just didn't guide for the rest of the evening. I'm not sure what else to try. I did reboot the guiding computer, as suggested by the Guider manual online, but it didn't help. 

Also, there was something unfamiliar to me on the TCS panel: the  Slit  and  DropLeaf  indicators were both red all 
night long and said  rain .... they began the evening saying  sun . Is this a problem, or is that normal? It didn't rain at all...

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Submitted on 2010 Sep 1 [5:17:50]