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What to do NOT GRB ToO GRB phenomenon
Photometry Spectroscopy Polarimetry Trigger email Tools
ALFOSC MOSCA NOTCam StanCam

Photometry: NOTCam

What do I do?

  1. If the trigger request specifies using StanCam in parallel with NOTCam, please check StanCam and NOTCam together


  2. For the trigger person

    For a GRB afterglow you can use the 3x3 dither pattern with 15 arcsec steps.

    The typical integration time for a single exposure is one minute. In the Ks-band the high skybackground in sommer months requires shorter individual integrations, down to 30 seconds. The command line for a dither observation with the 3x3 pattern is

    notcam.9point frame T N GRBxxxxxx stepsize skew Ncycles

    The recommended read-out mode is "frame". You can find here some information on the different read-out modes. The "frame" command stand for the ramp sampling readout mode. This means that the array is read out N times during an exposure. The total exposure time of an integrations is N x T, i.e. N x T is equivalent to NDIT x DIT. The total integration time is given by the number of positions in the used dither pattern and the number of dither cycles (Ncycles). stepsize gives the size of a dither step in arcseconds, while skew gives the size of the small offsets to the pattern to avoid an object falling on the dead column three times per cycle.

    For the observer

    To set up NOTCam with the requested filter in the beam, run

    notcam.setup-ima wf filter-ID

    where filter-ID is 236, 201, 203, and 207 for the Y-, J-, H-, and Ks-band, repectively. The script also takes care of the required focus offset.

    Run either script attached to the trigger email or located in

    ~obs/scripts/51-504

    or run the commands as given in the trigger email. This has to be repeated for each filter.


  3. Send an email to the GRB team and add in the End-Of-Night report, which images were made, and approximately how much time you spent in total.


  4. If you have any problems or questions contact your support on duty. You are also welcome to contact the GRB team or the PI (Palli Jakobsson) of the program either with e-mail or phone a member of the team using the contact information in the trigger email.






This webpage was last updated on September 12, 2012. Please send comments or suggestions to

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