Owl disappeared, dome/telescope positioning error
Monday, August 11, 2025 6:26 AM
Problem(s) Encountered:
During the exposure, the Owl suddenly died. Restart the Owl and can not connet to the controler. We decided to home the telescope, however, TCS keeping showing
ERROR where m_dec not homed
ERROR where dome m_az not homed
ERROR home axis=m_dec open loop mode
The telescope seems not park at the right position, and the dome also not in the home postion.
Solution:
Found an orphaned Owl process running when I checked (ps -aux). Killed the process (kill xxxx where xxxx is the associated process ID) and Owl is back to functioning.Re-homed the dome and checked that everything is working well. The reason the telescope was found to be slightly off from zenith (12 minutes off is the standard) is something odd in the Treffers code that almost always introduces this variance. To correct, just drive the telescope to the proper tilt sensor values using the virtual hand paddle then zero the errors on the coordinates. Next, go to a nearby bright star and zero on that as well.