The new DIS slit imager is place and being used now. There are a few changes at this point, and there will be more. For now, please note the following: The new center for the DIS slit camera is at [199,297]. This is the bore site of DIS and near the center of the grating and chip. This is where your objects should appear after a slew. The new chip orientation is North/Up and East/Left. Our display here at APO is identical to IRAF, so no more wondering if someone is looking at a flipped image. The new slit imager has a larger field of view, about 2.7 minutes square. There is no need for darks as far as we have seen, this will speed things up quite a bit, especially for you 20th mag people! You will find your slit images in a new directory from now on: /export/images/dis-slit All slit image file names will have the same prefix from now on and will increment with each exposure. The prefix will always be the UT date. When one is finished, we will just message you saying that #39 is done or whatever the current increment is. The image names will be of the format: yyyymmdd.####.fits (eg. 20001129.0234.fits) Since this is a new imager, we are not completely sure of the sensitivity, so please tell us the magnitude of the object before you slew so that we can start to make mental notes about exp times and magnitudes. Eventually, this imager will be put into the hands of the observers and you will make all offsets and monitor your objects while exposing. This will do two things. One, give the observer the absolute knowledge of what is going on with the object while they are taking images. Two, decrease time from object acquisition to shutter open on the spectrograph. You can begin making yourself familiar with the operating system of this camera by going to the manual link below. It is very basic, should be a very small learning curve. http://loki.apo.nmsu.edu/~tcomm/slitview/ The imager is a UNIX program, and will not analyze the images. It is mainly for object identification. Of course, IRAF can analyze the images if you want better ideas of focus and such. You will need to run it from an Xterm. If you have any questions about the imager before a run, PLEASE let the observing specialists know. In about a month, once we are happy that the bugs are all run through it, we will begin transitioning from having the observing specialists running it to having the observers running it! If you have runs late in December or January or later, make sure you look at the slit camera documentation above, and perhaps just log in a little early to play with it. _______________________________________________ Noel Camron Hastings ~ Apache Point Observatory http://galileo.apo.nmsu.edu/~hastings APO APO APO APO APO Apache Point Observatory 3.5m APO APO APO APO APO This is message 470 in the apo35-general archive. You can find APO the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-general/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-general@astro.princeton.edu APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO