Weather station oddities
Problem(s) Encountered:
No major issues, but did notice the weather widget behaving oddly. Until midnight, it rotated from 86% humidity to...
Motion failure
Problem(s) Encountered:
At the beginning of the night, when I tried to start tracking on the TCS (setting the HA rate to the sidereal rate),...
Dome rotation issue and guide probe Axis failure
Problem(s) Encountered:
...dome glitched and started moving around on its own around 3AM so had to switch to manual mode (it also did this yesterday)....
Frozen domes don't move
Problem(s) Encountered:
Around 5:30 AM I went from targets in the northwest to a targetin the southeast. I realized I wasn't hearing the...
User error and a raised platform
Problem(s) Encountered:
Trouble due mainly to operator error: platform was left slightly raised after an instrument tweak and in the middle...
Issues stowing and oddities with encoder values and limits
Problem(s) Encountered:
When closing the dome in the morning. We set tracking rate HA to zero and attempt to point telescope to zenith, but...
Guide stars and JSkyCalc
Problem(s) Encountered:
I cannot find the guider star using JSkyCalc, so have to use some fainter stars in the guide camera. Do I need to...
Mirror covers fail to open, rotator not at 0
Problem(s) Encountered:
We parked the telescope and closed the dome due to threatening clouds around 9 pm. When the conditions started to...
Telescope motion failure
Problem(s) Encountered:
The telescope did not complete slew and we had to stop and re-try slew to got to target. About 30 minutes later a...
Rotator failure
Problem(s) Encountered:
The rotator won't rotate.
Solution:
Power-cycling the rotator control box corrected the issue....
2.4m Trouble Reports & Solutions
Recent trouble reports for the Hiltner 2.4m telescope. Note that you may find it worthwhile to peruse the 2.4m reports as well in case your problem is instrument-related.
Scroll down for a link to the complete archives.
To open a simple and searchable database containing all archived trouble report solutions, click on the following links. While there are individual links for each telescope, it is worthwhile to search both databases in the event that you experience trouble:
•Hiltner 2.4m Trouble Report Database (2026Jun09)
•McGraw-Hill 1.3m Trouble Report Database (2026Jun09)