Last Wed (22 Nov) the APO staff had a planning meeting with the WSMR people regarding the installation of the AMBER camera. During this meeting we addressed some concerns that APO had regarding the connection of the WSMR equipment to the APO telescope control electronics. Currently the installation is schedule to be done by 16 Dec. Note that everybody, APO and WSMR, feel that this is unrealistic, however, is does give us a goal to shoot for. The installation will include the camera and the tracking & telescope drive controls. I also talked to Charlie Conroy regarding the data storage requirements. He is getting two 16Gbyte RAID arrays from Storage Concepts for a total of 32Gbytes of storage. This will allow WSMR to collect data at the highest speed for 16 minutes. He is looking into higher capacity drives that might be available for our uses. Please note, that WSMR will be streaming the data to the drives and writing bits rather than writing a file per image. In addition, the data is alternated between 8 drives. Charlie and I think that the best solution for APO scientist is to install at SCSI tape drive on the WSMR equipment and use their electronics to read the disk and write a tape in a format that APO can use. If there is anybody on this list who is use to handling lots of astronomical images I could use some advice on how to write this tape. Given the available frame rates (~1000/sec) a file per frame does not seem the most economical option. Also, given the large quantity of data we are considering the use of DLT tapes rather than 8mm or 4mm. If anyone has comments or concerns about these options please let me know so we can get them addressed. Jim Fowler APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 6 in the apo35-amber archive. You can find APO the archive on http://astro.princeton.edu:82/apo35-amber/INDEX.html APO To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu APO To post a message, mail it to apo35-amber@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO