At the Telescope ...

Pointing Restrictions

Avoid pointing closer than 3 degrees from zenith crossing and to zenith distances larger than 70 degrees.

Atmospheric Restrictions

When the wind speed is larger than 12m/s, point at least 90 degrees away from wind direction. The telescope will be closed for wind speed larger than 18m/s.

Telescope will be closed whenever the dew point is within 1.5 degrees of any telescope or instrument temperature. It will be open again only after humidity gets to the green range for at least 30 minutes.

Telescope will be closed during periods of complete or almost complete cloud coverage.

The decision about closing and pointing restrictions is made by the weather officer and the telescope operator, respectively.

Workstations

wu#dhs for retrieving your OBs : the ftp transaction from your directory on the Linux PC (visas-account) will be done by the support astronomer. Please do not create your own directories on wu#dhs machines.
Login to p2pp with your user name and import the OBs.

wgsoff# for quick look data reduction, netscape, etc...This workstation does not intefere with the telescope nor instrument control, so it is the ONLY one where you can run your prefered software. On wgsoff#, you also have access to your raw data in the directory /data-ut#/raw/yyyy-mm-dd/. You should not create directories under /data-ut#/raw/ or /data-ut#/reduced/, but rather copy files to the home-directory and work on them there. You may use the ESO tool GASGANO on this workstation, which allows an easier handling of the raw and reduced data.

The instrument workstation is managed by the support astronomer. BOB is the interface between your p2pp-session and the instrument. A Real-Time Display (RTD) is available on this workstation, where you can quickly check the quality of your data.

Target Acquistion

The acquistion of the target is done by the supporting night astronomer based on the instruction of the visting astronomer. The visitor should therefore participate in the acquisition, and confirm that the proper target is chosen and that the OB can be continued.

Observation Log

The support astronomer fills in a night report, containing the acquired files, image quality and general comments. You will be given a copy of this night report.

Day-time calibrations

The calibrations will be started in the morning by the night astronomer and checked by the day-time astronomer.