Re: Photometric solutions: Disk 16 vs. Disk 17

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

I would vote for a data acquisition program that extracted two little 
thumbnails of the V and I image and put them up on the screen along with 
the mean value of each image, the sigma and a PSF for a sample of 
stars.  As Michael points out, the mean is a good cloud indicator.  Sigma 
tells me that the temperature controls are working and that nothing is 
icing up.  A glance at a small star field would reassure the operator.  The 
PSF would indicate that the focus was OK.  About 1/2 by 1/2 degree 
thumbnails would be fine.

Based on how long it seems to take IS to do these operations, they will not 
detract from the data acquisition time.

What say Chris, what is your thinking about on line diagnostics?

Tom Droege

At 05:32 PM 4/16/01 -0400, you wrote:

>   I've modified the pipeline to handle the data on Disk 17.
>There were three major issues:
>
>       a. the convention for image file names changed.  The old file
>          names looked like this:
>
>                   H3R1816.755


snip


>   As I work on this data, I am realizing more and more that it would
>be extremely useful to have a set of diagnostic values printed out
>somewhere (probably into a log file(s)), showing quantities on an image-
>by-image basis.  For example, given a list like this:
>
>           image number          sky value           FWHM (pix)
>          --------------------------------------------------------
>              1                    1802               3.4
>              2                    1815               3.3
>              3                    1799               3.4
>              4                    1830               3.5
>              5                    2102               4.0
>              6                    2250               4.2
>              7                    2883               4.1
>
>one could very easily and quickly conclude "clouds moved in after image 3".
>
>   I guess I'll need to build some routines to create such log files
>for the pipeline.
>
>   It would also be helpful if someone just happens to have a routine
>which reads FITS images, and creates GIF or JPEG thumbnails from them
>using "threshold" and "scaling" information supplied by the user.
>The ImageMagik program "convert" _almost_ does it all, but doesn't
>allow me to set the contrast myself.  Any ideas?
>
>                                          Michael Richmond
>