Planning and Scheduling Software for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

Niall I. Gaffney
Hobby-Eberly Telescope

Mark E. Cornell
McDonald Observatory

Session ID: P8.05   Type: poster

Abstract:

We present the initial design of the planning and scheduling software for the 9.2 meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) currently being commissioned in West Texas. The HET is operated by McDonald Observatory on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat München, and Georg-August Universitat Göttingen. Once completely operational, 85 nights are expected to be used in a queued mode where the night is dynamically scheduled as observing conditions change. In this mode, data are acquired by resident astronomers on behalf of potentially many different PIs for many different observational projects each night. In order to reduce construction costs, the HET is fixed in altitude at , and tracks an object with an Arecibo-style tracker. Consequently, the HET can access only a limited portion of the sky at any time and can only track an object for roughly an hour at a time. Because of these motion constraints, efficient use of the telescope relies strongly on software. Software tools are required to know when and how an object can be observed and how best to sequence observations over the course of a night. Our system contains both planning and scheduling tools. Planning tools are used to determine the feasibility of observations to be made with the HET. Scheduling tools are used to schedule observations during a night and over the course of an observing semester. Initially, command line driven tools were developed which make conceptually separate numerical calculations for HET operations. Next, TCL/TK GUIs were layered on top of the command line driven programs. This scheme has two benefits: pipeline processing of object lists will be possible without using the GUIs and several simple tools can be combined to create one, more complex, tool. We will present examples of our planning and scheduling software, their functionality, and their expected use.

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