Observing system

Calibration script at the end of the night taking too long (new) -----------------------------

The automatic script "notcam.notcam-calibs" that can be started at the end of the night to take darks with all used exposure modes during the night, may take many hours to finish, depending on the number of modes used. This is problematic if one wants to enter the dome during daytime for maintenance work - or filling cryostats.

Done:

- The default number of darks was lowered from 10 to 6.

TBD:

- This has a practical side that needs to be thought about for the new NTE instrument where daytime calibrations will be needed for all instrument modes during several hours every day

Rotator limit check added to all NOTCam template scripts (new) -----------------------------

NOTCam obsevarions typically consists of multiple short exposures. Thus, checking whether the rotator will reach limit for each exposure, as is implemented for the other instruments, does not make sense. Instead, it was decided to add this check into the template dither scripts we offer.

Done:

- The implementation has been done by calculating the total time the script with the selected parameters will take, using a conservative estimate of the overheads, and compare this to the time to reach rotator limit (requesting the TCS). If there is not sufficient time to terminate the script, it is aborted with an error. The user can then decide to try the script with modified parameters (i.e. faster) or to turn the rotator.

- All the scripts 9point,5point,abba,beamswitch have been modified and tested. The new versions of these scripts are now in use.

TBD:

- This check could be included for the script generator, as well.

A known problem with NOTCam is that sending an abort signal to the detector controller during an on-going exposure will cause the system to hang, requiring a restart of the system. It was noted that the `abort' command has been disabled, but that doing a Ctrl-C when running a script can cause a problem when given at the wrong time. To avoid this, basically all commands that perform an exposure (exp/dark/frame/dframe) were modified such that it will ignore any Ctrl-C command (with an appropriate warning message in the Talker) when given during the execution of an exposure.