Dome Motion Failure

Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:59 PM

Problem(s) Encountered:

When the telescope was sent to positions on-sky, the dome would not follow.  Work around for the night involved manually setting the dome.


Solutions:

With the failure the previous night with dec motion, the spare TCS computer was called into service.  Dome control is through the C/T #1 (DT2819) and A/D (DT2816) boards in TCS computer.  Unfortunately, while testing the system with spare boards, the computer has completely died.  Motherboard issue?  It’s unclear currently if the problem stemmed from the Counter/Timer or the A-to-D.  We currently do not have spares for all boards, however I am looking for spares, and OSU is sending us some spare ISA motherboards that we might be able to use to salvage the spare computer.  In  the meantime, we are down to a single TCS control PC.