MDM Trouble Report for 2014 Oct 25

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Ryan Chornock (Ohio University)
Instrument: CCDS/Retrocam

Problem(s) Encountered:
1) I had to refill the CCD dewar twice during the night.
I was sure I filled it all the way in the evening, but after several hours I took a long spectrum that came out noisy with a high background (i.e., not useful data).  I went into the dome and checked the display on the instrument. It said that it had warmed up to -59 C.  I pointed to zenith and refilled. Later on, I caught it again after I noticed some strange low-level noise in my data.  It had warmed up to -85, so to be safe I refilled again.  It was fine through the rest of the night. 
My suspicion is that I was doing a lot of work at high airmass and funny rotator angles at the beginning of the night.  I know some instruments have LN2 losses in such situations.

2) I had some instrument problems later in the night. Prospero froze on me once, so I restarted it.  All was well until I tried to change the grating tilt.  It just stalled out with no errors, but the status display turned to red.  I cntrl-c'd out of there (tried changing both tilt and wavelength).
After a few iterations, I restarted ISIS/Caliban/xtcs/Prospero.  Prospero would no longer start up correctly and would stall out when trying to contact IE.  The ultimate solution was to go out into the dome and power cycle the IE. After it came back up, Prospero was happy again and I worked for the rest of the night.

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Submitted on 2014 Oct 26 [7:03:00]