MDM Trouble Report for 2011 Aug 25

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Schroeder (Columbia)
Instrument: Osmos

Problem(s) Encountered:
The dec encoders appear not to be functioning anymore.

Early in the night, upon trying to slew to the first object,
the dec encoders were not working properly (changing by increments
of arcseconds when they should have been degrees). This caused the
telescope to slew to its hard limits and damaged some of the 
insulation on the air conditioner hose. Jules and I managed to get
it out of the hard limits and the telescope encoders seemed to be
responding again. I at one point closed and reopened the TCS 
Hiltner.exe program so maybe that sent a cold jolt of water to its
system. In any case, the TCS behaved normally for the rest of the
night until I went to move away from the Milky Way to do flats. I
noticed the same behavior and stopped the telescope, moving it
back to zenith with the hand paddle and then resetting the 
encoders. I then tried to salvage what I could of the sky-flats
time and attempted to slew to another location. Again, the dec
encoder gave the same behavior. At this point, I re-stowed the
telescope at zenith and declared the night over. I did not
restart Hiltner.exe. At this point, the dec encoder isn't
working at all essentially rendering the telescope unusable.

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Submitted on 2011 Aug 26 [6:00:56]