Spectroscopy

The spectra that are extracted using the post-processing system are now made available to the visiting astronomers on a disk accessible to them.

The target acquisition script has been modified to check the guiding status of the telescope before and after acquisition to avoid guiding problems to go unnoticed by the observer.

The system that is used to for the alignment of the optical elements have been moved away from the observers' data reduction computer to avoid any possible interference. The alignment system has now also been included as a sequencer command.

Following the example of the EasyThAr scripts for FIES which checks the illumination level and defines a proper exposure times, similar scripts will be develop to automatically take properly exposed wavelength calibration and flat field exposures. This is especially of use for ToO observations or service observing where a standard set of calibrations can be defined and executed from a script (e.g., to run all the daytime calibrations). As ALFOSC has many configurations, some of which are seldom used or very different from the normal set-up (e.g., an offset slit), this for the moment will only be developed for the most regularly used set-ups.