MDM Trouble Report for 2012 Oct 07

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Colon (UH)
Instrument: Nellie Direct

Problem(s) Encountered:
When I went to take dome flats in the afternoon, I encountered an error in the TCS gui that said:   focus sec not homed 

I immediately called Bob and followed his instructions to home the focus drive:
(1) In the TCS gui I clicked on the  Home...  button
(2) I checked the  Focus Drive  option and clicked  Apply 

After the telescope finished doing its thing I was able to focus the telescope to the appropriate setting.  However, a different error had then appeared in the TCS gui that said:  where m_ha not homed 

Somehow the HA and Dec were not homed anymore after homing the focus drive.  I called Bob again and I followed similar steps as above to home both the HA and Dec (i.e. in the  Home...  button in the TCS gui I checked the  HA Drive  option and clicked  Apply  then when that finished I checked the  Dec Drive  option and clicked  Apply ).

Following these steps seemed to fix everything, and I was able to take get on sky with no problems after that (but it was too late for sky flats at that point so I went straight to my target).

Everything was working fine until 00:30 when all of a sudden the tracking was turned off and I got an error in the TCS gui that said:  dome m_az not homed .

Upon checking the TCS log I saw that all the errors had returned (i.e. that the focus Sec and m_ha were also not homed).  None of the buttons to the move the dome in the TCS gui worked, so I exited the TCS gui and reinitialized, but all the errors were still there.

I eventually figured out to manually move the dome to the home position, which fixed that problem.

Since I had restarted the TCS gui the coordinates where the telescope was pointing were all blank.

I then tried to move the telescope to zenith manually using the hand paddle before homing the focus and the HA and Dec drives, but the paddle wasn't working.

The 2.4m observer was helping me this whole time, but we have not yet been able to figure out how to move the telescope back to zenith since the TCS paddle and the manual paddle aren't working.

We also have an error in the TCS gui that says any command cannot be sent because   Socket is not connected 

We think I might have accidentally hit the hour angle limit (which I thought was only for objects with declination > 70, and I didn't think to look out for since my object had a declination of +29 degrees).

I'm currently waiting for someone to call me back, as there seems to be nothing I can do right now.

------------------------------

Submitted on 2012 Oct 8 [4:06:54]
NOTE: This trouble report replaces the previous report for 2012 Oct 07