MDM Trouble Report for 2011 Jan 31

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): John Thorstensen (Dartmouth)
Instrument: Modspec + Templeton; Retrocam

Problem(s) Encountered:

Two glitches:

- Early on, lost THREE 12-min science exposures in a row to 
 asynchronous read errors.  After the first, I just cleared and
 tried it again.  The second failed.  I then did three short
 test exposures which read normally.  But then the third 
 long exposure failed!
 A test exposure again read normally (and looked fine), but 
 I didn't want to chance it so I hit the reset button on the
 CCD electronics, did the df templeton, ut init, etc., and 
 had no trouble after that.  I'd seen one or two async read
 errors on this run before this, but thought them to be 
 below concern. Time lost was more than the exposure length,
 since there's no 'beep' and I didn't notice the errors right
 away.

- I used retrocam, which was fine, but I had to push the motor 
 mike switch all the way to its limit and even then the guide star was
 a sizeable donut.  Amazingly, it guided ok, but when I went
 back to slit viewing and dropped the telescope focus back 
 down a hundred-plus units, the motor mike would not budge --
 it sticks at the end of its travel.  This is what I saw the
 other night.  I cured this by manually fussing with the 
 focus mechanism out in the dome, and after a couple tries
 hit an acceptable focus (for offset guiding while slit 
 viewing) more or less by accident.

- Oh, and at the last minute I had a coffee-maker meltdown when
I couldn't quite afford the time to clean it up properly.
Sorry about that!

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Submitted on 2011 Feb 1 [5:48:21]