MDM Trouble Report for 2025 Jul 02

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

Problem(s) Encountered:
The short story is I can't communicate with the telescope. The
longer story follows:

During a clear interval last night, I managed to grab about 18 
90-second cropped Templeton images of a new target. Something 
odd went wrong in my reduction pipeline that corrupted some of 
those images.

I didn't realize until just now, when I looked at the raw data,
that this had happened in my pipeline -- I'd assumed it was an
instrumental problem, since my pipeline has been very reliable.
So, I figured I'd better see if I could reproduce the issue.  
Monsoon is here and it's completely cloudy, so I ran a long 
sequence of exposures and didn't see the issue.  

It occurred to me that an instrumental problem could be position
dependent, so I tried pointing at the same part of the sky as 
last night; I figured

point ha=-2:30:00 dec=04:30:00 nodome

would do it, but it hung up.  I tried various things, such as 
turning on the tracking and pointing normally (dome and mirror 
closed, of course!) but it wouldn't do it. The dome did move off
the contacts to track, though.  I tried exiting and
restarting the TCS gui, and hitting  initialize , and it claims
to be OK, but when I try to home the dome it gives an error 
message:  Could not send command.  Socket is not connected. Is 
the TCS server running?  

I don't remember (if I ever knew) how to check this and restart
the TCS server if needed; it also sounds like a socket is bound
somewhere.  So I'm stumped.  Everything is normal, except the 
dome is not at home.  It's looking as if tonight will be a
washout anyway. 

Now I'll see if I can figure out where my pipeline went bad!


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Submitted on 2025 Jul 3 [0:38:32]