Using the NAOJ Camera (MCCD)

TCS
===

prime
Instrument pfccd
agselect prime
cal last
rot sky 92.8 (this is very important as it aligns ccd rows and columns
with N and E on the CCD)

Is all you really need to know, I have been taking 500 from both the x
and y probe values to get guide stars, until tonight where no
correction has been necessary, other than this everything has
worked fine. The observers have an uncorrected list of guide stars fro
each field they point at, and so they will supply all the necessary
information. To get complete field coverage you have to take four
exposures (to cover the holes left by the ccd's), and the observers
have been using the following observing recipe;

Move to target 
Quick exposure to confirm field
Acquire guide star
Second field (dec -189 arcs secs)
Third field (RA +193 arcs secs)
Fourth field (dec +189 arcs secs)

Archiving NAOJ MCCD data
========================

The camera produces a lot of data, somewhere between 4-6 Gbytes per
night, and you might have to use three D-tapes to archive it all. I
have been deleting the focus runs to reduce the data volume somewhat,
as these runs are of little use. To actually archive the data you have
to do the following;

log in to the machine Scorpio as whtguest (password wht_guest) cd to
the directory /obsdata/whtb and make a sub-directory for the night
i.e. may28 and cd to this directory.

ftp to the Mosaic ccd camera by typing ftp mccdipx.ing.iac.es 
ftp> cd /home/data/may28
ftp> prompt
ftp> bin
mget *

Once you have all the files quit out of ftp, in the
/obsdata/whtb/may28 directory you have a series of iraf files that
must be written to tape as fits files. I have been dividing the files
into smaller chunks by using the ls command to create file lists for
iraf in the following way.

ls N*.imh > junk.01

In the directory you are in type mkiraf and proceed to set up iraf in
the usual way, then write no more than 2Gb of the data to tape using
wfits.

The tape devices in IRAF are called mtsd0 and mtsd1

and I just set wfits writing with the appropriate file list (see
above) as the input. Make sure that when you write the data to tape
you write no more than about 2 Gb, you might have to write more than
one tape.

NEVER ftp data when you are reading out the ccd camera as this needs
quick access to the disk, I have been doing it during long exposures,
you will also find that while you are ftping the network will slow to
an absolute crawl. What I have been meaning to try is ftping the data
at the end of the night once everybody has finished usingthe network
and you have a couple of hours before the day work people start
working. But because of the bad weather over the last few nights I
have not really had a chance to look at this properly.

The tape verification is again another difficult issue on this instrument
by doing the following commands you can check if the tape is readable:

> source /star/etc/login
> source /star/etc/cshrc
> kappa
> fitshead /dev/rmt/1n 10


Creating Log file
=================

The LOG have to be created manually on this instrument because the run
files have no headers and the data acquisition computer isn't conected
to the TCS. So we have been doing the following:

- login  at  lplogs account and change to logdata directory and then
   move to the current month directory ie: cd 05-98

- then copy one of the previous nights file to the current data for the
  night:   cp 980528.wht  980530.wht

- then edit the file and delete the runs information and enter manually
  and update all the rest of the information then print the file
  as follow:

>a2ps -1 -nd -F8 -nL -l 980530.wht | lpr -Pwht_laser

then you will see ie:
> [980530.wht: 2 pages on 2 sheets]
> [Total: 2 pages on 2 sheets]