This is yet another astropy IERS thing. astropy 4.0.2.

When the mcsActor gets the time cards from the ics.utils routines, we get a familiar astropy error: "(some) times are outside of range covered by IERS table.", but in an unfamiliar context.

Calling the same routines directly, as the same user on the same host (pfs-data@mcs), the timecards routines work fine:

In [1]: from ics.utils.fits import timecards
In [2]: import time
In [3]: tc = timecards.TimeCards()
In [4]: tc.end()
In [5]: tc.getCards()
[good stuff]

Not quite sure where the problem is. But we cannot lose the primary time cards when getting something as unimportant as LST. I propose to wrap the LST in an except and live without LST.

Maybe the astropy 5 in rubin3 will fix that, but we cannot test under the current circumstances.