Observing system

The common DS9 based display system has now also been released for use with FIES/StanCam. The definition for the direction of movement was changed in connection with the move from the old to the new (sequencer based) post-processing system for FIES/StanCam.

New interactive sequencer scripts were made for the staff to self-calibrate the position of the fibers in StanCam images.

Some updates were made to the standard FIES calibration script fies-calibs, which now accepts command-line arguments. The user can now specify the number of flat fields and biases they want. The new script will always make the data available on the /data/service/calib directory accessible via anonymous ftp. If sufficient flat fields and biases are made the data will also be made available for use by the FIEStool online reduction.

The instrument scripts that set-up the instrument for calibration or target observations for the different fibers were improved such that they will be queued until an ongoing exposure is finished. Also the scripts to take target or calibration exposures were improved such that they will wait for the CCD camera to be idle before sending any CCD related commands (e.g., binning or starting an exposure). All this is intended to enable better scripting of these tasks in superscripts, and in order to lower overheads.

A new script (fies.setup-ccddefaults) was made to set the FIES CCD parameters to default (as at system startup), and a new script (fies.setup-fib23-star) was made to set-up the instrument for observations with simultaneous sky.

Thomas Augusteijn 2010-05-27