Instructions for GBT12B-160: Tracing the Warm Ionized Medium (Dana Balser, Loren Anderson, Thomas Bania, Trey Wenger)

Observing (X-band)

  1. Set the scan number to 1.
  2. Run scheduling block peakFocus. This will perform an AutoPeakFocus.
  3. Run scheduling blocks sb01, sb02, sb03, etc.. Each scheduling block will perform a number of OffOn pairs on a target source using the Spectrometer. Run these scheduling blocks in order. If you have to abort during one of the scheduling blocks just run it again.
  4. Run scheduling block peakFocus about every 2 hours. At X-band we want to update the pointing about every two hours, except during sunrise/sunset where you should point every hour. The time for each scheduling block will vary but each OffOn pair will take about 15 minutes. The number of iterations will be printed out by Astrid. For example: "OffOn iteration 1 of 2". In this case there are two iterations so the scheduling block will take about 2*15 = 30 minutes.

Quality Control

  1. Check the pointing/focus results. If the pointing or focus scans are bad then just abort and re-run peakFocus. If the pointing or focus cans continue to fail after two attempts then just move on to the other scheduling blocks. Use previous pointing and focus corrections if available; otherwise zero out these corrections.
  2. Check the Spectrometer bandpass. We are tuned to 8 spectral windows at 2 polarizations. Make sure we have a reasonable bandpass in all 16 spectra. For example, below is a screen shot of Astrid for one of our runs where only half of the spectra look normal (that is, there is gain over the approximately 50 MHz bandwidth), but the other half are corrupt. When this occurs please reset the Spectrometer and run the scheduling block again.

astrid.jpg

-- DanaBalser - 2012-10-01
Topic attachments
I Attachment Action Size Date WhoSorted ascending Comment
astrid.jpgjpg astrid.jpg manage 197 K 2012-10-01 - 14:30 DanaBalser Astrid Screen Shot
Topic revision: r6 - 2012-10-02, DanaBalser
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