The Nightwatchman

Edition 5

Spring 2003

Hilo, March 1

TSS Support

JCMT's TSS corps has continued without substantial change over the last 
six months.  However, some changes are expected in the near future.

The first change is that JCMT is currently recruiting for a fifth TSS to 
supplement the current collection of full-time TSSs and support scientists 
serving as part-time TSSs.  This position is expected to be filled in the 
late spring or early summer.

The other change is that Robin Phillips, who has frequently served in a 
TSS capacity in addition to his support scientist duties, will be leaving 
this month to take a position at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, 
Canada, with David Naylor's group.  Having provided extensive support for 
heterodyne instrumentation and summit troubleshooting, Robin will 
certainly be missed by our group and we'd like to thank Robin for his 
dedication and skill devoted to JCMT's instrumentation suite.  Also, Robin 
played a large role in developing the program whereby support scientists 
would take occasional TSS shifts on the summit, thereby integrating TSSs 
and support scientists to a greater degree while also supplementing 
support scientists' familiarity with the nighttime operation of JCMT 
instrumentation.

The OMP

As continuum observing did last semester, heterodyne observing has also 
obtained a new look and feel this month.  The Observation Management 
Project (OMP) continues moving forward full tilt.  The OMP now supports 
the vast majority of heterodyne observing modes, released as an 
early-delivery for the ACSIS instrument and amended for use with our 
current suite of heterodyne instrumentation.  From now on, the OMP will 
provide an interface to observing for heterodyne investigators and 
observers alike, but with a few caveats.

First, investigators whose applications for observing time have been 
submitted this semester have performed that submission using old-style 
heterodyne observing templates.  This is because the heterodyne Observing 
Tool (OT) is still under development.  Those old-style heterodyne 
observing templates are received by support scientists and then manually 
entered into the development version of the heterodyne OT by the 
appropriate support scientists.

Once this step happens, all interaction by heterodyne investigators and 
observers happens in a fairly routine manner just as with continuum 
observing.  The online OMP feedback system handles both local and remote 
interaction with all heterodyne projects, observations, and associated 
bookkeeping in a manner similar to that for continuum observing.  When at 
the telescope, the Query Tool (QT) displays suitable heterodyne observing 
programs right along with their continuum counterparts, with all projects 
intermingled according to the rankings given by the telescope allocation 
committees.

Unlike continuum observing, actually executing a heterodyne program 
displayed in the QT is performed by the TSS who receives an on-the-fly 
translation of the support scientist-prepared OT program and implements it 
in the old-style, command-line heterodyne observing mode, but with 
fallback access to the original heterodyne project template created by the 
investigator to insure that the observations are performed in the spirit 
of the original heterodyne observing template.

Going back to the issue of the OT, all heterodyne investigators who visit 
JCMT to observe their projects have the option of being given a tutorial 
in the use of the heterodyne OT by JAC staff if they wish and those 
investigators may then subsequently use the heterodyne OT to edit and 
amend their programs that have been entered by support scientists from 
their originally-submitted old-style observing template.

This development version of the OT that supports heterodyne observing is 
currently available both on-site at JAC and at the summit at JCMT.  It is 
also scheduled to be released fully to the community in semester 03B with 
the expectation that it will be used for program preparation by all 
heterodyne investigators as the old-style heterodyne observing templates 
will be phased out.  Then, the OT will support full, native development of 
observing programs for both continuum and heterodyne observing modes.

La Citation du Semestre

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than 
the day.

Vincent van Gogh

Happy summer eclipse chasing (total lunar and annular solar lunar)!

Jonathan Kemp

www.jach.hawaii.edu/~jkemp

j.kemp@jach.hawaii.edu