The GUIDECAM tool

What is GUIDECAM ?

Guidecam is a Skycat-based tool that allows to select a guide star from catalogues overlaid on the focus field of view, the VIMOS or VISIR field of view and of the telescope guide probe.

In view of the experience obtained during the previous semesters of VIMOS operations, the selection of a guide star by the user with the Guidecam tool is mandatory for all (pre-)imaging observations. The user must select a guide star which does not vignet the field of view or, in case this is not possible, a guide star that produces acceptable vignetting, for example by blocking only those regions of the detector array where no objects of scientific interest are found.

For VISIR, the use of Guidecam is optional. The explicit selection of a guide star is recommended when having several imaging OBs for a given faint source. See the VISIR P2PP page for more details.

Once the user selects a guide star, its coordinates must be entered in the OB ('Guide Star RA' and 'Guide Star DEC' entry fields), and the 'Get Guide Star from' entry field in the acquisition template (e.g. VIMOS_img_acq_Preset) should be set to SETUPFILE.

Supported Platforms

As of Period 75, Guidecam is only supported for Linux RedHat 9.

Note about this release

Guidecam is shipped with the additional "Finding Chart" plug-in. Please note that it is mandatory to produce VIMOS (pre-)imaging finding charts with the Guidecam tool. The use of Guidecam for VISIR is optional.

New for VIMOS users: the Finding Chart plug-in allows you to superimpose the VIMOS detector footprint on your Finding Chart. Learn more about the plug-in in our Finding Chart cookbook.

Guidecam Installation

To install Guidecam, you will need to retrieve the tarball for your operating system, unpack it, and start the Guidecam executable.

Please follow these steps:

Move to the directory where you want to install Guidecam.

Download one of the following tarballs:

guidecamLiteLINUXRH9.tar.gz [GUIDECAM for VIMOS - Linux Redhat 9 version - 6.5 Mbytes compressed]
guidecamVisirLINUXRH9.tar.gz [GUIDECAM for VISIR - Linux Redhat 9 version - 6.5 Mbytes compressed]

Unpack the tarball

gunzip -c guidecam[Version].tar.gz | tar xvf -

guidecam[Version]/

Move to the guidecam directory

cd guidecam[Version]

Initialize the environment variables according to your shell

source setvars.tcsh

bash users:

source setvars.bash

Start-up the software

./bin/guidecamLite