MDM Trouble Report for 2021 Oct 15

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): Keighley Rockcliffe, Aylin Garcia Soto (Dartmouth College)
Instrument: MODSPEC

Problem(s) Encountered:
Several occurrences of the same issue happened over the course of tonight's observing run (10/15 - 10/16). We use Owl 3.0 to coordinate our exposure details. In the top left corner of the GUI, there's a button to press called 'EXPOSE' when you want to start your exposure. When we know we would like to observe a target multiple times, we check the 'Multiple Exposure' function and set the number of exposures we'd like. Then we hit the 'EXPOSE' button, and the telescope will sit on that target taking the number of exposures we indicated. Normally, once the exposure starts, two new buttons will replace 'EXPOSE' in the top left corner of the Owl GUI: 'ABORT' and 'PAUSE'. These buttons are there to completely cancel an exposure or to pause it. On several seemingly random occasions, an exposure would stop running all on its own (not a case of me accidentally hitting the button) and the 'ABORT' and 'PAUSE' button will be replaced again by the 'EXPOSE' button (which may indicate that it isn't just a case of the GUI freezing). The 'Time Remaining' bar remains frozen at the time when the exposure stopped. The 'EXPOSE' button needed to be pressed again, which would start that exposure all over again. The .fit file for the stopped exposure was never written, which makes sense since it seems like the exposure never finished. We're unsure what is causing the exposures to randomly stop, but this happened a few times over the course of the night. Since we weren't able to immediately catch when these instances happened, we lost some observing time, but we estimate it wasn't more than an hour.

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Submitted on 2021 Oct 16 [5:40:55]