The ORAC observing tool (ORAC-OT) is derived from the Gemini Observing tool, with changes to reflect the UKIRT observing paradigm, telescope and instruments. The "look and feel" and essential functionality of the Gemini-OT have been maintained, and core features such as the appearance and behavior of the desk top and tools icons are identical to the Gemini-OT.
The ORAC-OT provides a visual editor designed to allow you to fully prepare your observations in advance of your run by specifying : the instrument set up, target and guide star positions, sequences of telescope moves and instrument/IRPOL/FP changes, data reduction recipes, standard star observations. It also has features which are intended for use for flexible/queued observing such as specifying weather conditions and "chaining" observations together, which are not currently in use at UKIRT, and should simply be ignored.
A Science Program defines a number of Observations of astronomical targets and calibrations, which need to be obtained to achieve a scientific goal. Thus at UKIRT a Science Program contains the definitions of all the observations that will make up a PATT run or a night of service observing. No limit is enforced on the number of Science Programs you create per PATT run, but since the rest of ORAC is designed to fetch only one at a time from the database it recommended that you create one Science Program containing everything you need for your observing run. A Science Program can contain observations to be taken with any UKIRT instrument, it is not instrument specific.
An Observation defines the data and how to acquire it for an astronomical target or a calibration. An Observation may thus consist of "array_tests", in which a series of darks are obtained, or JHK photometry of a point source, spectroscopy of an extended target, or a flat and an arc. The Observation component in the OT contains items which together specify the target coordinates, the guide star location, the instrument configuration, the types of data to be obtained (Darks, flats, arcs, etc), the order in which data is to be obtained, the ORAC-DR recipe and the sequence of telescope moves and exposures to be used.
The OT is used to create your Science program by copying into it a template for the type of observation you need and editing it, for each observation in the programme. Depending on your program you may have one observation for each target or several.
The best way to become familiar with the OT capabilities is to create a Science Program containing your observations based on the The UKIRT Template Library.
The documents below provide information about using the OT with various levels of detail. The first three should cover all that you need for normal UKIRT observing, while the remaining documents provide help in how to construct observations from scratch without using the templates.
Original : 1999/10/24, Last Modification Date 2000/07/26 - Last Modification Author:Gillian Wright