Uves P2PP Tutorial

OVERVIEW

Observing in Service Mode:
Philosophy and Scheduling

Goal of the run

In this tutorial we will prepare OBs for a simple example observing run, consisting of high resolution spectroscopy of Eta Car (RA(2000) = 10:44:39.1, Dec(2000) = -59:37:44). The sample OBs will illustrate the use of a variety of features of P2PP and the kind of decisions to be taken at the time of preparing in advance an observing run, as well as some aspects that are specific to the preparation of OBs for Uves.

1- Getting started

The Phase 2 process begins when you receive a communication of the ESO Visiting Astronomers Section communicating to you that the allocation of time for the coming period has finalized and that the results can be consulted in the corresponding Web page. The communication from ESO contains a login ID and password that you need in order to consult that Web page, but it is also your ID and password for the use of P2PP. You follow the instructions given by ESO and find that time was allocated to your run with UVES. Therefore, you decide to start preparing your Phase 2 material.

First, you collect all the necessary documentation:

The UVES User Manual.
The UVES Templates Reference Guide.
The UVES Service Mode instructions.
The P2PP Documentation referred to above.

and you proceed with the installation of P2PP in your machine if necessary. For the sake of this tutorial, we will hereafter use the following P2PP information:

P2PP ID: 52052
password: tutorial

This is a special account that ESO has set up so that users who do now have their own P2PP login data can still use P2PP and prepare example OBs, and you cannot use it to prepare actual OBs intended to be executed.

After logging in using the tutorial account, the P2PP main GUI will appear as follows:

Runs for a number of instruments appear in the Folders area, since the same tutorial account is used for all of them. Similarly, if you log in with your own P2PP ID, you will get the list of all the runs in which you are PI.

Select the folder corresponding to the Uves Tutorial run, 60.A-9252(G). In this tutorial we assume that time was allocated in Service Mode. This is indicated by the SM letters that appear next to the Run ID of the Uves run.

You can now start defining your OBs.

2- Creating the first OB

First, click on the New icon on the upper left side of the P2PP main GUI. This creates an entry under the Summaries area. The red dot next to the OB name means that the OB fails to pass some fundamental verification criteria, as may be expected from the fact that no template has been attached to the OB yet.

Click on the View icon. The View OB window appears:

This is the window where you will define the contents of your OB.

Setting the OB name

It is always a good idea to give meaningful names to OBs, so that you can browse through the list and easily recognize them. In our first example, we will build an OB to take a spectrum of Eta Carinae using UVES Blue Arm; for this reason we will call the OB ETA_CAR_BLUE_ARM. Type this name in the Name entry.

Setting the target information

In the Name field under the Target tab at the bottom, type the target name (Eta Carinae)
In the Right Ascension, Declination fields, type the coordinates given above
Since the coordinates are given for both epoch and equinox J2000, leave these fields with their default values
You can give also the Class to which this object belongs, for archival purposes. In this case, choose Pec* (peculiar star).
The proper motion of this target is negligible for the purposes of this example, and differential tracking of the telescope is not needed since this is not a moving Solar System target. Therefore, you can leave the last four fields in the Target tab set to their default values of zero.

Setting the constraint set

As stated in Section 1, we assume for the purposes of this tutorial that the program has been allocated time in Service Mode. You thus need to specify a constraint set for your OBs. You can do this by clicking on the Constraint Set tab and filling the entries under it:

First, give a descriptive name to the constraint set about to be defined. Since you have decided that this constraint set will be applied to all Blue Arm observations, you type Eta Carinae Blue Arm in the Name field.
Since you are not interested in achieving accurate flux calibration of your spectra, you request Clear conditions in the Sky Transparency entry.
Since you need moderately good quality in your images, you specify 1.0 as the value of the Seeing field.
The Strehl ratio applies to observations with NACO only, so leave the default value there.
Set the Airmass to 2.0, to ensure that your observations are not carried out at too low an elevation.
Since you are doing high resolution spectroscopy of a bright target, the lunar illumination has very little influence. Nevertheless, you have decided to require 0.8 and 45 degrees for the Lunar Illumination and Moon Angular Distance fields.

Note that in your Phase 1 proposal you already specified some of these constraints (lunar illumination, seeing, transparency). You must make sure that none of the constraints specified in Phase 2 is more stringent than the corresponding one specified at Phase 1.

Setting the time intervals

We will assume now that the spectroscopy of Eta Carinae has to be obtained in April 2003, since you will have simultaneous observations at other wavelengths during that time interval. You can specify this under the Time Intervals tab:

Click on the checkbox at the far right next to the first row of the time intervals.
Modify the lower boundary (the left-hand side entry) of the time interval to the specified starting date of your time window, keeping the same format. In the present case, the entry should read 2003-04-01T00:00:00.
In the same way, modify the upper boundary of the time interval to 2003-05-01T00:00:00.

If your observation could be executed in other, non-contiguous time windows, you could define up to five intervals in the same way as described.

The User Comments and Calibration Requirements fields are free text fields whose contents are self-explanatory. We will leave them blank in this example.

Defining the acquisition template

The first template that must be part of any OB that requires a definite pointing is the acquisition template, so let us define it next. In the Template Type list, make sure that the acquisition entry is highlighted. This will list all the acquisition templates available for Uves in the Template list next to it.

After reading the description of the templates in the Uves User Manual, you have determined that the UVES_blue_acq_slit is the acquisition template you have to use for this particular observation. You thus click on this template in the Template list, and then on the Add button next to it.

You need to decide now on the acquisition parameters. Since we want to acquire directly on Eta Carinae, we will set RA and DEC blind offsets to 0. Moreover, the target has no meaningful proper motion and therefore you do not need any additional tracking velocity. You also do not have any special requirements on the guiding star, which will be selected in the VLT guide star catalogue and hence there is no need to specify any coordinates for the guiding star.
Since you want to place the slit on a position angle of 37.5 degrees, you have to chose SKY as derotation mode and you must specify the proper position angle.
Eta Carinae is a bright star, and thus it is a good idea to use the neutral density filter ND2 as pre-slit filter. There is no need for a depolarizer, but you do want to limit the slit losses and therefore you insert the Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector, setting it to AUTO.
The set of parameters that you choose in your acquisiton template is thus:

RA blind offset: 0.0
DEC blind offset: 0.0
RA additional tracking velocity: 0.0
DEC additional tracking velocity: 0.0
Get guide star from: CATALOGUE
Guide star RA: 0
Guide star DEC: 0
Derotation mode: SKY
Position angle: 37.5
Acq. Pre-Slit filter: ND2
Depolarizer: OFF
ADC: AUTO

The acquisition template is now complete. Note that the acquisition template UVES_mode_acq_slitrrm should be used for ToO observations in Rapid Response Mode only.

Defining the Observation Description

Once the acquisition is completed, the science observation begins. The science observation is defined in a set of one or more templates that form the Observation Description, or OD for short.

It may be useful in many cases to have an easy way of identifying an OD, like when having observations of a number of targets performed with identical instrument configuration and exposure times. The Name field in the View OB window allows you to define names for the ODs. The OD name appears in turn in the Summaries area of the P2PP main GUI, thus allowing the identification at a glance of all OBs having ODs with the same name.

In this example OB, the OD will consist of a sequence of three spectra with increasing exposure times. We can thus appropriately name it ETA_CAR_OD_BLUE. We enter this name in the OD Name field.

Next, the templates need to be attached. After checking with the manual and considering the scientific requirements of your program, you have found that the suitable template to be used is UVES_blue_obs_exp.

On Template Type, select now science. The existing Uves science templates will appear. Select the chosen one, UVES_blue_obs_exp, and click on Add. The template will be attached to the grid below next to the acquisition template selected and filled previously.

What you need to do next is to set the parameters in the science template.

Following the recommendations of the manual, you choose to use the standard read-out mode 225kHz,1x1,low. For your scientific purposes you need to obtain 3 spectra of 30 seconds each of Eta Carinae, which is definitely and extended object. Due to high signal-to-noise ratio you reckon to achieve, you do not need to perform any offset along the slit. The default central wavelength is fine while you want to gain a little bit of resolution using a narrow slit. The set of parameters that you choose in your science template is thus:

Blue readout mode: 225kHz,1x1,low
Blue exposure time: 30
Number of exposures: 3
Source type: EXTENDED
Number of offsets: 1
X offset in arcsec: 0
Y offset in arcsec: 0
Blue mode central Wlgt: 346
Blue slit width: 0.4

Since you now want to perform another two sets of observations with longer exposure times, you can select again the same template, Add it, and fill the parameters in the same way as done for the first template. However, since the parameters of these other two templates will be very similar to those of the one just defined, you can speed up the preparation by clicking on any entry of the template for the 30 seconds exposures, then clicking on the Duplicate Col button on the upper right, and then clicking again on the same button. In this way, you will have produced two identical copies of the first science template in which you should now only edit the parameters that change from template to template, i.e. the exposure times, which are going to be 180 and 300 seconds respectively.

You can now compute the execution time clicking on the Recalc ExecTime button on the upper right side of the window.

NOTE: after each modification in the OB, the execution time field is not updated automatically, and you need to click on the Recalc ExecTime button to display the correct value.

Attaching Finding Charts and the README file

Starting in P74 and P75, respectively, the submission of Finding Charts and the README file are not via ftp any more, but they are directly attached to the OBs. Please, see the respective tutorials on Finding Charts and README for instructions on how to do that.

This completes your first OB! If you followed all the indications given so far, the View OB window should look like this now:

and you should see an entry under Summaries in the P2PP main GUI with the following contents:

You can reshape the columns as indicated in the P2PP User Manual to view the full contents of each entry.

3- Defining an Image Slicer OB

Let us assume now that you wan t to take spectra of Eta Carinae using the Image Slicer and Dichroic #2.
Since your target is the same, you can save some time if you duplicate the OB you just created and modify its contents as needed. To do this, select the Blue Arm OB just produced and click on the Duplicate button (the second one in the row of icons on the top right). This creates an exact copy of the OB in which only the name (now with the -0 suffix added) is modified.

Like before, click on the View icon to be able to view the full contents of the OB and modify it.

You can first modify the name of the OB and OD, for which we now suggest:

Name: ETA_CAR_IMSL_DIC2
OD Name: ETA_CAR_OD_IMSL_DIC2

The acquisition has now to be done with a specific template, i.e. UVES_dic2_acq_imsl. This differs from the previous one you have used in that you have to select the guiding camera (RED or BLUE), it inserts the appropriate Image Slicer (#1) and does not allow to chose Derotation Mode and ADC.
Once you dave decide that you want to guide in the BLUE, the content of the acquisition template is as follows:

Guide camera: BLUE
RA blind offset: 0.0
DEC blind offset: 0.0
RA additional tracking velocity: 0.0
DEC additional tracking velocity: 0.0
Guide start from: CATALOGUE
Guide star RA: 0
Guide star DEC: 0
Image slicer: SLIC#1
Acq. pre-slit filter: ND2
Depolarizer: OFF

Concerning the OD, one single UVES_dic2_obs_exp template will suffice now. We can thus start by deleting the three science templates in the OD (the Blue Arm ones), one by one, by clicking on one of their entries and then clicking on the Delete Col button on the upper right. Be careful to click indeed in the one entry of the template that you wish to delete.

After doing this, your OB contains only the acquisition template. The next step is to add the science template UVES_dic2_obs_exp and to fill in the required fields. To do this, select the item in the list and click the Add button. For your scientific purposes, you want to obtain three exposures, 1200 and 1800 seconds each, in the BLUE and RED arm respectively, using the standard CCD readout (225kHz,1x1,low). For the central wavelengths you need 346 nm in the BLUE and 860 nm in the RED. As in the previous example, you want to enhance the spectral resolution using slits of 0.4 arcsec.

The content of the UVES_dic2_obs_exp template thus becomes:

Blue readout mode: 225kHz,1x1,low
Blue exposure time: 1200
Red readout mode: 225kHz,1x1,low
Blue exposure time: 1800
Number of blue exp.: 3
Number of red exp.: 3
Source type: EXTENDED
Number of offsets: 1
X offset in arcsec: 0
Y offset in arcsec: 0
Dic mode central wlgts: 346+860
Blue slit width:0.4
Red slit width: 0.4

The contents under the Target tab can be left unchanged. If the same constraints as defined before for the Blue Arm OB are appropriate for the DIC2 observation, you can also leave the contents under the Constraint Set tab unchanged.

If this OB does not have any timing constraint, you must edit the contents under the Time intervals since the Blue Arm OB did have. To remove the time constraint, you only need to unckeck any box next to the entries defining the boundaries of the time window that was previously checked. You do not need to restore the starting and ending times of the time window to its defaul values.

This is the aspect of the finished ETA_CAR_IMSL_DIC2 OB:

4- Finishing the preparation and submitting the OBs

The P2PP main GUI displays the two OBs that we have prepared:

We will now submit these OBs to the ESO Database. Select all of them in the Summaries list, go to the File menu in the P2PP main GUI, and select the Check-in option. A dialog box will appear asking for confirmation and, if you click on OK, they will be saved in the ESO Database. Once this is done, the ingested OBs will be locked and no further modification is possible, unless you first check them out. This status is indicated by a green lock.

5- Check-Out and removal of tutorial OBs from the ESO Database

As a courtesy to the next user who follows this tutorial, we would like to ask you to finish these exercises by checking-out and removing the OBs form the ESO Database. The P2PP User Manual gives you detailed indications on how to do this. In short,

Select Check-out... from the File menu in P2PP
In the Database Browser window that opens, type 60.A-9252(G) in the Prog ID selection criterion
Select other keywords you may want to be displayed (e.g. Target, Instrument and so on)
Click on the Query button on the lower left
Select the OBs you have created in the display area after the query. Normally there should be your two submitted OBs only, but if another user has submitted other OBs from this same account without removing them afterwards you will see them as well (as in the following example).
Under the File menu in the View OB window, select Check-out

In this way the OBs will be removed from the ESO Database and will be left in your Local Cache only. From there you can delete them if you like by selecting them and choosing the Delete option under the File menu in the P2PP main GUI.