MDM Trouble Report for 2015 Nov 13

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Frank (OSU)
Instrument: OSMOS

Problem(s) Encountered:
Apparently, there is a problem with the TC>IC link, 
which manifested itself in a rather interesting way.

Operations went perfectly smoothly, until around UT 07:00, when the 
program we use to get the objects into the slit (osctrtask on
a pyraf session on /hiltner) started complaining, and ultimately 
aborting with the following error message :

*****************************************
Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File  /usr/lib/python2.3/lib-tk/Tkinter.py , line 1345, in __call__
    return self.func(*args)
  File  /usr/local/pkg/lib/python/pyraf/epar.py , line 789, in execute
    self.runTask()
  File  /usr/local/pkg/lib/python/pyraf/epar.py , line 1041, in runTask
    self.taskObject.run(mode='h', _save=1)
  File  /usr/local/pkg/lib/python/pyraf/iraftask.py , line 271, in run
    self._run(redirKW, specialKW)
  File  /usr/local/pkg/lib/python/pyraf/iraftask.py , line 1074, in _run
    apply(self._pyFunction, pl)
  File  osctrtask.py , line 259, in osctrtask
    obsep, rotangle = biasquads(acqroot, acqimage )
  File  osctrtask.py , line 165, in biasquads
    rastr, decstr, eqstr, rotangstr, filtid2str, objectstr, exptimestr, datestr, timestr, jdstr = hselout[0].split('\t')
ValueError: unpack list of wrong size
**************************************

I looked at the FITS headers for the files in questions,
but could at first glance not find what may have been wrong 
in those compared to the ones used just before that error message.

Everything else behaved totally normally, and there were no 
apparent warning signs that something with the TCS link 
may have gone awry.

Since I was able to circumvent the problem of not being able to
use this specific tool for slit alignment, I simply began
 jogging  the objects into the slit manually, and encountered
no other problems.

However, when towards the end of the night, I looked over the 
TCS agent console messages, I found out that ever since then 
error messages like the following had occured :
OUT: TC>IC DONE: TCSLINK=Down DATE-OBS=2015-11-14 TIME-OBS=14:37:40.654
 TIMESYS=UTC JD=2457341.109498 MJD=57340.609498 

It hence seems that the TCS server does not communicate with 
IC. Restarting the TCS PC (as per the description provided)
successfully brought that PC back into normal operation mode
(which had not been affected anyway), but the TCSLink remains
down. The Prospero Status window, however, shows both TC : Up +
TCSLink in green (and hence I did not check the TC>IC communication
earlier, as I had no indication that the problem 
could be rooted there).

The red power supply indicator lamp on the TCS Power rack has begun
flickering.....

Before messing unneccesarily in my tired state with this,
I have decided to leave the problem alone (also because
the weather forecast predicts two nights of almost zero chance
to observe).

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

Submitted on 2015 Nov 14 [8:03:42]