Minutes from SSS Mtg 2009-Jan-13

Attendees: B.Butler, M.Claussen, D.Harland,    G.v.Moorsel,
           F.Owen,   J.Rochford, L.Sjouwerman, B.Truitt

OPT for Ka Call

Claire held a meeting yesterday at which it was decided that a call would be made right away for Ka proposals. This will be part of the Feb 2. PST deadline. Earliest proposal is for late B-configuration. Bryan spoke with Clair after the meeting and settled the date of first execution of OPT generated script as Monday March 2, 2009. This means, of course, people will start using OPT before that.

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Lorant's Testing & General OPT Discussion

  1. Lorant made more NRAO default hardware setups.

  2. Frazer pointed out that we should not worry about 4 & P bands until WIDAR.

  3. Lorant raised issue re: naming of scans in downstream applications (eg, aips). We (OPT) are using source name. When same source is used in multiple scans, it can be difficult to find a particular scan. Bryan pointed out that the archive has no spot for a scan name label.

  4. Discussion re: Time On Source Summary. Lorant had a situation where he thought, and group agreed, that the summary should show a single entry where it showed two. Right now, if two scans are different, they get different entries in this summary. We will change the logic so that entries are combined if they have same:
    1. source name
    2. source position
    3. scan mode
    4. hardware configuration except that the integration time shall not be considered when comparing h/w cfgs.
  5. It appeared for a moment that OPT was not marking pointing scans as such in the execution script. On closer inspection Lorant had used a h/w configuration labeled "X Band Pointing" but did not actually create a pointing scan. So all was well with the program, but if this tripped up our expert, it will do the same to others.

  6. Rather than use defaults of zero for API and wind speed, we need to use defaults that are based on the highest frequency band used in a scheduling block.

  7. We can suppress the solar separation input field for now.

  8. We should add warning messages when a source is within 5 degrees of the sun, moon, or a planet. Issue: need ephemeris for solar system bodies.

  9. There should be a warning for a source that is close to the zenith.

  10. There will be a number of things not in place by the time the OPT is exposed externally. We should maintain a list of these and make it available to users.

  11. The current dynamic scheduler thinks in terms of half hour (LST) blocks. Brian knows what needs to be done regarding Barry's DB for this. There was discussion about warning the user if their SB consumes less than N
  12. 30 minutes less 10 seconds.

  13. The user should be able to enter comments at the project, program block, and scheduling block levels. The project and prog block comments are for the user's benefit only. The scheduling block comments will be passed as python comments in the script for communicating with array operators.

  14. The LST Start Range field in the Scheduling Block Details tab is initialized as 00:00 - 00:00. It is not obvious that this means hh:mm - hh:mm. We will do something to make that more obvious.

  15. The current scheduler does not accommodate a range of start dates, only a start-after date. We will temporarily suppress the 2nd date in the range.