MDM Trouble Report for 2016 Jan 14

Telescope: 2.4m
Observer(s): Alper (Dartmouth)
Instrument: Modspec/Echelle

Problem(s) Encountered:
Around 8:00 pm, I noticed that the dome was moving freely of the
telescope, in a pattern of 11 seconds movement every three
seconds. I puzzled over this for roughly 15-20 minutes before it
simply started rotating endlessly. I called Eric at this point,
and he explained that this has been happening from time to time,
that the dome decouples from the telescope. Under his advice, I
saw that the dome azumuth readout wasn't changing at all as the
dome moved clockwise (increasing azimuth value).

He instructed me to set the dome to manual control and see if it
changed when I moved it counterclockwise, but that he would
likely have to reaplce a blown chip tomorrow and that I'd be
stuck with manual control for the night. The dome azimuth
value did indeed decrease with counterclockwise movement, but
still stayed steady when rotating to the other way. I reset the
dome azimuth encoder as well, but no luck there. In the end I
did indeed stay on manual control.

The guider also stopped working shortly after this. The previous
group on the 2.4 informed me that this had been happening,
though it had been fine for the last two nights, I believe.
I set the probe to origin to no avail, but after some trial and
error discovered that a dy offset of 500 put the proper guide
star back in the frame. After roughly two hours of this
behavior, the guider simply started working correctly again.
Who knows.

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Submitted on 2016 Jan 15 [7:36:48]