Care and Feeding of the 1.5m (60") Telescope

Created: 09/26/04 by EF

Updated: 01/20/20 by EF

Table Of Contents

STARTUP
SHUTDOWN
DOME
Telescope control PC flwo60 (Linux dual Opteron)
TCSGalil PC (aka Mount PC)
TELESCOPE FOCUS
POINTING LIMITS
GUIDE PC for FAST
FILLING DEWARS
TELESCOPE FOCUS
TELESCOPE SEEING(with FAST)
TELESCOPE PERFORMANCE
Problems

Problems

Lost dome
Mirror covers fail to open/close completely
CCD problems
Unresponsive tcs (on flwo60)
Unresponsive monitor (on flwo60)
restart of tcs hangs (on flwo60)
Unresponsive flwo60 ***CAUTION***
Mountain power outage
Telescope hit trip wire on pier
Lost coordinate position ***CAREFUL***

The dome may occasionally get lost. To retrieve the pointing of the dome, go to the Tele Tasks menu of the TCS and turn off dome tracking, and then click on Home Dome. This will send the dome to its home sensor. Now turn the dome tracking back on.

If the mirror covers fail to open or close completely (e.g. 1 petal sticks), please call a staff member for guidance.

If the FAST3 CCD stops or is very slow in reading out, or you see a read error message in the TCS window, or the data are obviously distorted, you should restart the CCD system as described here. Next, take a bias to see if the CCD is performing correctly. If that still fails, you should first exit TCS, repeat the CCD system cycling procedure, and restart TCS. If you are unsure about any of these steps or the recovery fails, please call a staff member.
If your exposures look like biases and you can confirm that the telescope is looking at an open slit and not at solid clouds or closed mirror covers, the FAST shutter may not be functioning properly. Take a short exposure and listen (or ask the 1.2m observer to listen in the chamber) for the shutter opening and closing. If you are unsure about any of these steps or if the shutter still fails, please call a staff member for help.

Sometimes tcs freezes; everything else seems alive, but tcs won't work. A likely explanation is that there is a sub-window (like TeleTasks) hidden but still active. Try moving windows around or iconifying the main tcs window to make sure there isn't one of these hanging around.
If your command window is still responsive, type "exit" there. When all the tcs-related windows are gone, type "gofast" in an xterm.
If that doesn't work, it is probably necessary to kill off tcs manually and start over. If uncertain, please call staff for assistance.
If none of the above works, it's probably necessary to reboot flwo60 and start over. If you do that, you might as well go through the whole telescope startup routine again.
If you restart tcs but the process hangs, it may be due to the guider. The rguide window must be up for tcs to fully start. Look at the guider monitor. If you do not see the informational xterm rguide, click on QUIT on the guider window. Exit the hung tcs at the Telshell. Then right-click on the start guider icon and select Execute. You should see the rguide window with information come up, along with the guide view window. Then restart tcs.
The flwo60 monitors turn their displays off after about 10 minutes of inactivity. Usually, you bring them back on by mousing around. However, it may happen that the right-hand display remains off, even after vigorous mousing. The cure is simply to press the monitor's on/off switch off and back on. A few seconds after such cycling, the display should come back on. If there is a deeper problem with flwo60 (which might mean that the left-hand display is frozen or remains off), you should reboot flwo60 (see below).
Although it is unlikely, flwo60 may need to be rebooted during your run. An improper shutdown (e.g., by a power loss accompanied by a UPS failure, or by cycling the power without rebooting or shutting down from the OS) may result in loss of observing time. Currently, the proper way to shut down is from the login window at the display in the control room. The reboot will take a few minutes. If you are uncertain about taking this step, please consult with staff. If there is a problem during the reboot, the machine may actually need root intervention, at which time you most definitely will need staff assistance.
Our commercial power from UES (Unisource Energy Services) has been known to fail. Normally, the ridge generator kicks in quickly and delicate equipment survives thanks to UPS power. Occasionally, multiple failures may occur.
Start by asking for help if there is an onsite observer at the 1.2m, but also phone the staff if you have any doubts, and contact the MMT.
If you are certain that the power failure caused the generator (at the ridge, for the whole mountain) to kick in, please notify our electrician, Tom Gerl, as soon as possible day or night (see the FLWO directory for his phone number). You can easily hear the generator at the ridge when it's running. Check for its sound if the power has gone off; emergency lights should come on. The normal sequence is for the UPS to go on, so power is maintained until the generator starts, in less than one minute. The emergency lights should then go off. If there is a power failure and the generator fails to start after a few minutes, you should shut down as much equipment as possible, as quickly as possible. Communications equipment has additional power backup, but eventually phones and radios will stop operating.

The telescope is no longer able to strike the pier, after the DFM upgrade in August 2019. Instead, it may touch the trip wire, which will stop the drives. To recover, see Pointing limits.
What to do if your coords are way off!
If you think you could use bright stars to recover, try the brightGaia.mct catalog which has recent stellar positions to g=6mag.
If you are hopelessly lost, stow the telescope manually. Go into the dome and move the telescope to +32.3 deg DEC and to 24.01 hours as read by the large DEC and RA setting circles. Reboot the TCS-PC. The TCS-PC will load the TCS program and default to the stow position coords (LHA = 0 and DEC = 32). Either restart the Realtime System, or from the Misc menu of TCS click "Set PC Clock". This will sync the TCS-PC clock. Next turn tracking on, slew to a bright star near the zenith, position the star at the cross hairs of the finder scope, locate the star on the guide TV (don't forget to turn gain way down!), and update the telescope coords by "ALT =" on the TCS-PC.

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