Dome Rotation "Fugue" State

Friday, June 7, 2019 1:39 PM

Problem(s) Encountered:

When I sent the dome home to be able to raise the dropout, it didn't stop at the contact point but kept going around.  It was not obvious what to do, since the TCS can generally do one thing at a time, and the dome motion was apparently not going to stop.  Finally I got it to stop by asking for a particular position angle.  But the dome menu button was still yellow, effectively hanging the TCS. At this point I believed that it was probably a hardware problem like yesterday's so I started thinking about how I was going to get the dome closed and the telescope stowed. After a couple of tries restarting the TCS and GUI, it was possible to home the telescope, close the mirror cover, and surprisingly, home the dome.  But this all lost an hour, which included zeroing out the 12 minute RA error that appeared again. However, inspection of the dome contacts using the zoomed web cam appeared to be normal. So I went ahead and started observing again.  No other problems until I lost vnc connection in the morning. I need to learn more about how to fix that.  However, everything appears to be
okay now.

Solution:

Once restarting the TCS GUI, it might be possible to “Update” to clear the yellow-lit indicator.  Not sure, but worth a try.