MDM Trouble Report for 2022 Feb 07

Telescope: 1.3m
Observer(s): John Thorstensen (Dartmouth)
Instrument: Templeton direct

Problem(s) Encountered:
While I was taking evening flats the VNC connection seemed very
spotty, which I chalked up to our ISP having a bit of a slowdown,
but in retrospect it may not have been.

Everything went normally for several hours, and I got a lot of 
useful data.  Sometime before midnight, though, the VNC got 
very slow -- in particular, Owl was updating intermittently,
freezing for a minute or more and then suddenly catching up.  
The other windows were freezing a lot, too.  Weirdly, there
was a proliferation of little window-icon buttons in the bottom
bar (where the desktop cartoon and buttons to minimize windows
live), all labeled  Java  and apparently not connected to any 
windows -- I couldn't open those, or even delete them. 

Owl is in Java, and I wondered if it might be that the script 
that reads the telescope was messing up -- it does, about 
one time in every few hundred exposures -- but the image headers
almost all had correct telescope coordinates.  Strangely, the 
data all seemed fine, so I soldiered on.  

I tried several things -- logging off and back on, and restarting
Owl, each several times.  This did clear up the plague of Java
buttons.  After I restarted Owl for the penultimate
time, I took a few frames to set up a field, and then, when
I went to up the exposure times and take multiple exposures, 
I could not get the text entry boxes in Owl to respond.  So 
I exited Owl yet again.  When I got back, I got error messages
about not being connected to any devices.  I tried the  setup 
button and attempting to run the setup scripts led to more errors
about not being connected to any device.  

At this point I called the 2.4m, and Nicole came down to power
cycle things and wiggle connectors, but nothing worked.  
The connection was still pretty slow and glitchy, oddly, but
I was able to close up normally and, of course, call it a night.
I still don't know what the root problem was.

If this can't be resolved, perhaps I can switch to Andor for 
the next couple of nights.

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Submitted on 2022 Feb 8 [1:54:28]