MDM Trouble Report for 2014 Jun 10

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Graham Kanarek (Columbia U)
Instrument: TIFKAM

Problem(s) Encountered:
First, the telescope stopped responding in the middle of a slew. I'm not sure what happened, and it wouldn't go to any of the coordinates I sent or respond to the paddle. I fixed by slewing to the zenith (via the TCS, not paddle) which worked for some reason, after which it responded fine.

The much larger problem was the Guider. It worked fine for actually guiding, but whenever I tried to offset the probe using the MIS controls on the workstation, it was extremely unpredictable. It rarely moved in exactly the direction it was supposed to; sometimes there was no movement, sometimes there was movement in the wrong axis or the wrong direction. The offset distances were wildly variable. I lost a large amount of time putting each star back on the slit after every nod of the telescope.

I also lost some time in the beginning of the night before I realized what was happening, because each nod would drag the target off the slit and make the rest of the spectra for that target unusable.

Tomorrow night, if this hasn't been fixed, I'll turn off guiding, nod with the paddle, and then re-acquire the guide star...  which is slower than if I could use the guider, but should be faster than moving off the slit every time.

Also the pointing is terrible except for one particular region of the sky, but we already knew that.

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Submitted on 2014 Jun 11 [5:22:31]