SADT: The Survey Areas Definition Tool
What is SADT?
The Survey Area Definition Tool (SADT) is a tool that generates the pointing positions for each tile within a survey. In addition it searches the guide star catalogues and selects the suitable sets of guide and active optics stars necessary to observe the individual pawprints of each survey tile. In the case it does not find a sufficient number of guide stars or active optics stars, the tile position is slightly re-adjusted and the tool searches automatically again for suitable AG/AO stars. The output of the SADT (survey area file in XML format) must be used together with the P2PP for Surveys to generate the Observing Blocks (OBs) for Public Survey runs scheduled on The VISTA telescope.
Important note concerning releases
The current public release of SADT is version 3.04 of the software.
This version of SADT is released as a tarball.
Supported Platforms
The latest version of the Survey Area Definition Tool (SADT) is available for Scientific Linux running Java 1.4 or higher. It is known to work also under other Linux flavours, but not all have been tested. As a Java application it should also run under Unix, Mac OS X, or MS Windows operating systems running Java 1.4 or higher, but no support is guaranteed on other systems. Given that running P2PP for Surveys requires Java 1.6 it is suggested that SADT is also run under Java 1.6.
SADT Distribution
The SADT can be retrieved via anonymous FTP:
- SADT Retrieval and Installation Instructions for Version 3.04 (SADT for SV and Dry Runs)
How to use SADT
- The SADT Cookbook provides step-by-step instructions on how to use SADT with some examples.
- For a quick overview of the main SADT functionalities there is a 5 min long movie tutorial.
- Users should familiarize themselves with VIRCAM and its templates before using SADT. This information can be found in the VIRCAM/VISTA User Manual.