Data and Target acquisition

The various observing scripts were converted to comply with the rules for sequencer scripts. Also some improvements were made to some of the scripts.

Given the improved pointing and the introduction of the system to detect and center guide stars, the overall accuracy of the pointing is only limited by the accuracy in the know position of the guide star, and more importantly, the accuracy to which the optical distortions are taking in to account in the positioning of the guide camera. The overall accuracy is expected to be better than a few arcsec which offers the possibility to acquire stars directly on the fiber head without the need to first acquire the star with StanCam which would speed up the target acquisition process. This needs to be investigated.

The StanCam filters are an integral part of the target acquisition and guiding when observing with FIES. It is now documented that these filters should not be manually moved to other positions. This because target-acquisition scripts currently rely on these positions to be fixed. We are working on a system where the contents of the StanCam filter cartridge will be reported to the data base such that acquisition scripts can find the correct location of the filters and do not need to rely on the filters being in a specific slot.

The data acquisition software was modified to set the format for FIES CCD images to 2198x2052 where it used to be 2148x2052. There are now 50 extra over-scan columns which is needed to be able to properly implement the AB read-mode.

Thomas Augusteijn 2009-01-15