BAIT manual page

INTRODUCTION

This document is an attempt to introduce the programs used by the Berkeley Automatic Imaging Telescope (BAIT). New users should read the request man page. The baitusr presents a more elementary (albeit dated) introduction to the facility.

Many of the procedures below use image processing programs that are described in the XVista manual pages.

DIRECTORIES

At Leuschner there were two telescope users, `twenty' for the twenty inch telescope and `thirty' for the thirty inch telescope. At Lick there is a 'kait' user for the robotic telescope. In addition there is a third project user `bait' which contains common objects. Most executable programs live in the directory ~bait/bin, which should be on the PATH of all users. Some telescope specific programs (e.g. closedown) may be place in $HOME_DIR/bin directory which is searched before ~bait/bin. Each telescope operates out of its own account and must have its own home directory. To access a telescope, you must set the HOME_DIR environment variable to the home directory of the telescope account. (In fact this variable is the only thing needed to change telescopes.) This directory contains the special file ait.config which consists of keyword/value pairs that characterize the telescope. Information about the telescope limits, plate scale, filters, ccd and the names of the local and remote data directories are contained in this file. This file contains the path of the directory into which all data will be written. We denote this path by the term DATA_DIR.

We encourage that all procedures be written in a general manner and that all telescope specific information is contained by keyword/value pairs in ait.config

The required directories: Note: the form Mondd means the date in the format like Apr04 or Nov07. The filenames contain a digit denoting the year (of the decade) in which the data were taken.

MASTER PROGRAMS

The csh script daily.csh fires up all activities associated with the telescope. It is usually scheduled by crontab to run about noon local time. It does the following tasks:

insgen is the master telescope control program responsible for scheduling all telescope operations and observations. insgen is usually started by the daily.csh script, but can be started manually using the startins csh script. It writes into a file DATA_DIR/Mondd/insgen.log; you can observe progress of the observation by monitoring this file (show log). It also writes a list of the targets to be observed in the file DATA_DIR/Mondd/insgen.list. The tin communicates with insgen. and is used to add or delete requests, perform interrupts, and closedown the telescope.

insgen does not perform the observations directly but instead spawns telco to interpret the request file into doing something. telco reads each stanza (a section delimited by an END statement) of the request file and places all values of the keywords into the environment then executes the program contained in the PROCEDUR keyword. A popular procedure, photo_proc sets the filter, positions the telescope, acquires the star, makes the exposure, then corrects the image for dark, bias and flat fields in the background. See below for other procedures.

The telescope server is usually started by the daily.csh but can be started manually by the startnet csh script.

MONITORING OBSERVATIONS

Most of the programs write log files into the current data directory. The short hand csh script show which does a `tail -f' of the appropriate files. The following options are available:

STAR CATALOGS

There are several different star catalogs on-line. The largest is the Hubble Space telescope guide star which has stars ranging from about 6 to 15th magnitude. To get the coordinates of stars near a given targets use mboxofstars. The Yale bright star catalog and FK5 catalogs are available thru the bright command. Many photometric standard star coordinates and magnitudes are available thru the landolt command.

The environment variable CATALOGHOME points to the directory in which the stellar catalogs are kept.

REQUEST FILE FLOW

Incoming request files arrive by e-mail to the telescope control directory. The program accepter.csh intercepts mail and checks whether it comes from an authorized source using checkhost and is in a proper format using the accepter.

SKY CONDITIONS

The current sky conditions are determined by the dostandard program which does observes equatorial standards and compares the photometry to the catalog value and an empirically determined zero point. Any excess is attibuted to extinction. The fwhm of the stars are used to calculate the seeing. Both pieces of information are transmitted to insgen by the tin command and made available in the environmnt.

DATA CATALOGS

The data files catalogs are stored in the directory $HOME_DIR/CAT. The files ending in CAT contain lines like:

eveflat  02/11/1997 Nov72bqv R         5.39 twisky_flat_R         kait
eveflat  02/11/1997 Nov72btl clear     9.55 twisky_flat_clear       kait
RA20_02  02/11/1997 Nov72clf clear    30.00 UGC11513                SN
RA20_02  02/11/1997 Nov72cmh clear    30.00 UGC11550                SN
RA20_02  02/11/1997 Nov72cmz clear    30.00 UGC11568                SN
Where the first field is the id of the request file, the second field is the (Universal) date in dd/mm/yyyy format, the third is the id of the data file the fourth and fifth are the filter and exposure time (in seconds), the sixth is the object name, and the last field is the observer. All blanks are replaced by underscores.

The files with the extension .LOG list the data files stored on tape, and is simply the output of the tar program. For example the file Apr93.LOG starts as the following:

a ./Nov01/Nov71mmi.fts.Z 255 tape blocks
a ./Nov01/Oct7vyjl.fts.Z 102 tape blocks
Nov02 Record=2 **************************************
a ./Nov02/ 0 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/daily.log.Z 3 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/expiredlist 0 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/donelist 0 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/sn.log.Z 1 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/data.log.Z 1 tape blocks
a ./Nov02/sendmail.log.Z 1 tape blocks
The data backup tapes and the .LOG files are created by the archive command. Before running this command the nofat command should be used to remove all extraneous files and compress the FITS files (typical compression factor is 5).

The data files can be recovered from backup tapes using the extract command. This command generates a C-shell script which contains `mt' and `tar' commands integrated together.

OFFSETS

There are several different ways to calculate offsets: The findoffset converts back and forth between angular offsets on the sky and row/column positions on either the imaging or guider CCDs. The guidestage programs positions the x,y guiding stage stage so that the guide star will be centered in the field of view.

GUIDING

The acquire shell script is used to find the guide star on the guiding CCD. The guide program runs the feedback loop between the guider and the telescope keeping the telescope centered. The gs script determines the best guide star to use for a request file. The guidselect program determines the vignetting function for guide stars depending on their relative location to the telescope coordinates.

IMAGING

The image program takes a CCD image at the current telescope postion and filter setting and writes a FITS file. The guimage program takes an image using the guider ccd. The fimage program takes an image using the finder ccd. The pfilter program can be used to position the filter wheel.

EPHEMERIS PROGRAMS

  • apparent - correction for nutation, aberration etc.
  • asteroid - returns the coordinates of major/minor planets.
  • dist - calculates the angular distance between targets.
  • jd - prints out the current julian date
  • lst - returns the current local sidereal time.
  • moon - lunar position.
  • moondist - calculates the distance targets was from the moon.
  • precess - performs precession calculations.
  • refract - computes atmospheric refraction.
  • sun - solar position.
  • toeclipt - converts ra dec to ecliptic longitude and latitude.
  • ut - prints out the current universal time.
  • utday - prints out the current universal date.
  • visible - determines whether targets are visible with the telescope limits.

    • TELESCOPE CONTROL

    The tx program send messages to the telescope server and can be used to send low-level commands such as pointing the telescope or moving the filter wheel. openup is a shell script used to open the dome, turn on the power and do a variety of functions to prepare the observatory for making observations. keepopen is a program that keep the dome slit open and the telescope pointed out the slit in lieu of other activity. closedown turns off the telescope power, and shuts down the observatory.

    The baitman man page describes some manual operation of the telescope.

    TIME

    We rely on the Sun system clock to set all other clocks it is kept current to other computers via the XNTP protocol.

    Other utilities are ut and utday print out the universal time and date in nice formats.

    PROCEDURES

    Procedures are distinguished from usual programs because they are usually invoked by telco thru the PROCEDUR keyword in a request file. They are usually just shell scripts that get their input from environment variables. The commonly available user procedures are the following.

    In addition there are procedures that are used internally for maintenance and calibrations.

    LOG FILES

    There are a variety of log files generated by the telescope and written into the da directory.

    TEMPORARY FILES

    Many programs write temporary files. Some of these have the process number and the extension .tmp and are usually deleted by the process. However, others are left around for a day or two in case some problem has to be debugged. The nofat shell script deletes these files as well as compress all the FITS files and convert all photometry and supernova search files into archives.

    PHOTOMETRY FILES

    Photometry and star location data are written in files with the .pht and .coo extensions respectively. The data are written in a mixed file format in which the first part is the FITS header taken from the data file (see the buffers command) followed by the output of the phot or stars commands). The END statement serves to delit the two portions of the file. The subheader command may be used to strip off either part of this file. The pformat command can be used to get the values of specific symbols.

    PC OPERATION

    Each PC is running its own server program. The have different names but are all invoked by the startnet command on the PC.

    REQUEST FILE GENERATORS

    There are several scripts that are used to generate request files for special purposes.

    MAIL ADDRESSES

    The following users (aliases) have been setup:

    baitmgr - is the person dealing with operation of system nd is the address to whom questions and complaints about the system should be addressed.

    baitusr - the e-mail addresses of all the active (or otherwise interested) users of the telescope. It is the address to which operational notes and informational bulletins will be sent.

    snmgr - the e-mail address of the person interested in the progress of the supernova search. The daily reports are sent to this address.

    MISCELLANEOUS

    The following are used as tools for format and unit conversion or simple numerical analysis.

    XVISTA SYMBOLS

    The XVista library of programs has a facility for storing information as a series of keywords and values. The values are accessed thru the let command and are stored in the symbol table file $HOME_DIR/sym. While we discourage use of this table since it can make programs difficult to debug, there are certain variable that we have not been able to avoid particularly in The symbol table is created each day by the daily.csh and can be found in the current data directory.

    ENVIRONMENT

    For the bait telescope to work properly you must customize your environment in the following manner. The following environment variables are needed:

    HOME_DIR - must point to the directory in which ait.config resides MANPATH - should include the bait manual directory SYM_TABLE - should be set to a convenient file (see XVvista) TAPE - should point to the tape storage device CATALOGHOME - should point to directory containing star catalogs PATH - should include HOME_DIR/bin and ~bait/bin If you wish to take images from your own account (rather than the telescope account), you should set `umask 2' so that the telescope will have group write privileges into your image file.

    The umask setting should be set to 2, so that members of your group can write the image data. The `noclobber' variable should not be set, since many scripts write over existing files. Ideally, no aliases should be used in the telescope accounts, since their operations makes assumptions about their behavior.

    Last Updated October 08, 1998

    Email: rtreffers@astro.berkeley.edu

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