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Facilities on site

Observers should contact their support astronomer as soon as possible after arrival for a briefing on the current performance of the instrument and telescope. Note that the astronomer scheduled for support may not be on the mountain-top until the day of the observing run.

The library on the first floor of the INT building houses paper copies of the Palomar Sky Surveys I and II (the latter still arriving), film copies of the SERC J and ESO B surveys, and copies of various other atlases and charts e.g. the SAO and Papadopoulos charts. There is a light table, and a Polaroid camera for making finding charts. The STSCI/NASA digitised sky survey is at the time of writing (Feb 95) on order.

The library takes about 50 journals, including all the major titles, with significant back runs (mostly not before 1950) of AJ, ApJ, MNRAS, PASP, A&A and others. Further details of these, and of books held on site can be obtained from librarian@lpve.ing.iac.es.

There are currently two data-reduction clusters, comprising Dec VAX and SUN SPARC computers respectively. The VAX cluster comprises a VAX 3500, 4 VAXstations, SCSI disk drives and tape drives for DATs, Exabytes and half-inch 9-track tapes. The cluster runs the VMS operating system, and has Starlink software, MAIL, EDT, LaTeX, Fortran compiler etc.

The SUN cluster comprises 6 SPARCstations, with SCSI disks and drives for DAT and Exabyte tapes. There is a SPARCstation for data reduction in each of the telescope control rooms. Software provided includes the Starlink UNIX collection, IRAF, LaTeX, GNU Emacs, the Mosaic information browser, a number of editors and mailers, and Fortran (f77) and C (gcc) compilers. The Sun cluster runs SunOS 4.1.3, but is due to be upgraded to Solaris 2.4 during 1995.

Guest accounts on the VAX and SUN clusters may be obtained by running a captive account whose name and password are known to local staff.

Information on the current status of the computing facilities is included in the Visitor's Pack which awaits each observer on arrival.



next up previous contents
Next: Observing protocol Up: Observing and after Previous: Observing and after




Tue Aug 15 16:42:46 BST 1995