ENR CTIO Blanco 4-m 2022-12-09

Several problems tonight.

At the start of the night, Marco+Diego tested the new guider readout machine, which seemed to be working ok, except by me not being able to see the guide stars from my remote location. Diego found that the new machine is not in the DNS and hence not visible from the outside. Adding it by hand to my computer (and Diego's) solved the problem.  

Once Marco and Diego left, we were to start science observations and moved the telescope to the desired position, away from zenith. Image quality  was very bad. Central CCD was usually good, but stars in the outer CCDS (for example, S1, N1, N7, N31) had very elongated shapes or signs of coma. The usual method of running several images to get continuous improvement in the image quality did not work. We tested extensively in diferent positions in the sky with no good results. As examples take a look at *124, N7; *127, S1; *128, N31

An additional problem (unrelated?) is that a couple of times when sending the telescope to the zenith,  4MAP and the telescope mount system came down.  Eventually Claudio cleaned the tacomethers and we did not had that problem anymore. 

Following Marco's advice we got back to the old guider readout machine. Stars started to look fine again in all CCDs. We started science observations at 1:15am.

In 2 occasions we missed some CCDs in images. The sequence of events was exactly the same as the previous night. First, comfort display misses some CCDs (but images are fine when inspected with bigload). A couple of image later, and aler was produced with the message 'Missing CCD extensions". Observations got frozen (nothing happened) and reset/configure do nothing. The only way we found to continue was to restart sispi. This happened twice (image 1154232, 2:15am; and 1154262, 4:17am).

I may be missing other details. Marco, Manuel, Claudio, feel free to reply with more if needed.