Guide to the Stars Server

This is designed to be a walkthrough through the Student Teacher Astronomy Resource Server (STARS). For more detailed information on the Stars Server look at the Stars Server page on this wiki. If you have any comments or suggestions for improving this site, contact Amanda or Marc.

The Main Page

The Navigation Bar has links to the web part of the server and other SEO resources. You can hover over the bar, and some hidden content will pop out at you!

    • Education: This has information on courses and outreach projects using SEO.

      • ASTR 212: Link to the most recent Astr 21200 class wiki

      • Public Files: Link to a public folder on stars, a quick way to share data without login or external services.

      • GLAS: The website for current education and outreach at Yerkes.

    • Stone Edge: Links for using the SEO telescope

      • Main Page: Links to the public SEO page with tutorials, announcements and an image gallery. You might have to scroll down to see something on this page.

      • Wiki Page: A link to the SEO page on this wiki.

      • Queue: Access to the queue where you can submit observations to SEO.

      • Slack: Access to the SEO channels on Slack.

    • Yerkes: Links to operations at Yerkes Observatory

      • Skynet: A robotic telescope network to which Yerkes is connected to.

      • Monitors: Live monitoring for the environmental conditions in the Yerkes telescope domes.

      • Yerkes Home: This link brings you to http://astro.uchicago.edu/yerkes which is the home page for Yerkes.

      • Young Stars: Find our biographies here!

      • Dome Cam: You can find the dome camera from here.

    • FITS Data

      • SEO Queue: Link to the FITS viewer for images taken with the SEO queue. See more information on using the FITS viewer below.

      • SEO 2020: FITS viewer for the 2020 SEO data. There is a viewer for each year (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, . . .) and each telescope (SEO, Y24).

      • Data Folders: Raw access to the data folders. The folders are organized by /images/observatory/telescope/year/date/observation/Fits_Images.fits. For queued data the folders are organized by /images/astroclass/observer/observation/Fits_Images.fits. The data folder also contains the Archive and Temp folders.

      • Header Viewer: This looks at your FITS file and tells you all of its metadata tags. All you do is choose a picture and it autostarts.

      • FITS uploader: It's an uploader to the Stars Server to upload FITS images to a folder automagically. There is a tutorial for that.

      • Gallery: Links to the picture of the universe blog.

      • SEO Astroclass: Alternative webviewer to the SEO queue data

    • Internal: These are links for the interns.

      • Projects Wiki: brings you here!

      • File Manager: It's a file manager hosted by Yerkes. It's used for storing files on Stars. There is a tutorial that will guide you through using it.

To access the subsets, again, hover over the boxes to see what's hidden underneath it.

There's a picture in the center from the Picture the Universe blog.

The FITS Viewer

The FITS Viewer is at stars.uchicago.edu/fitsview17. It is a tool to look at and analyze FITS images stored on the server.

The following screenshot illustrates the parts of Web View:

Function Navigation: This panel provides access to the basic Web View functions:

    • Date / Object List: Displays a list of all current and past observations. Depending on which FITS viewer you're looking at this item can be named differently.

    • Data Viewer: Links to the data viewer.

    • Pipeline Log: Displays the most recent messages in the pipeline log.

    • Help / Manual: Links to the current version of the stars server manual.

To open a new tab, just right click (or Alt click - Win, or Command click - Mac) on any of these links.

Data Viewer

The Data Viewer is the primary interface to view and analyze image data. The screenshot above shows the elements of the interface. Depending on the width of your browser window the elements can be arranged in different ways:

Data Selection: These pulldown menus allow the user to select the data to view.

    • Date: Select a date.

    • Object: Select an Object (observation) during the selected date.

    • File: Select a raw data file from the selected Object.

    • Pipe Step (optional): Select a data reduction step to view.

The selections above identify an individual .FITS file to view. The Download File and File Info tools both refer to that FITS file.

    • Display: Which data set of the selected FITS file to look at. Header and tabular information can also be selected here.

    • Image Frame: If the viewed data contains an image cube, layers of that cube can be selected here.

Info: This field displays information from the FITS header of the selected file.

Image Tools: This dialog provides information about the image display and allows the user to change display zoom, scale and color. These options are only available if image data is being displayed. The Zoom Display shows a zoomed-in image of the pixels around the mouse cursor, mouse coordinates and cursor value are shown above.

Image Display: The image shows the image data. If the current image does not fit the screen, vertical and horizontal scroll bars appear. When you open the page a preview is shown, once the image data loads a message appears "Unpacking Image - Done"

Problems and Fixes

If there are problems with the data viewer, reload the page or reset your browser. Other errors can occur:

    • The data viewer returns an error message from Apache. Usually the cause for that is an empty Date / Object / Observer folder or a corrupted FITS file. Open a different date or a different AOR. Alternatively, remove offending files and folders on the webserver. When the automatic data reduction is running it is possible that certain Flight/AOR folders contain incompletely reduced observations, wait until the reduction is complete and reload the page.

    • Your web browser hangs: This can be caused if you load a large image. To show you the image, the FITS viewer downloads the data to your browser, depending on your browser it can slow down. To fix this wait, reload the page or update your browser.

Remote Access / File Transfer

Anyone can access files in the /data/images folder using the following methods:

    • WGET with https: On Windows (with WSL), Mac and any Linux system, use the following command:
      wget -r --no-passive --no-check-certificate https://stars.uchicago.edu/pub/images/"folder"/"subfolder"/
      Make sure you end with a "/" and have the --no-passive flag, else the all files in the folder above are also copied.

    • FTP: You can also get access through anonymous FTP using the
      ftp stars.uchicago.edu
      command. BTW Cyberduck can also do FTP.

    • FPP / SCP Clients: Various programs are available to make ftp or scp data download easier. For SCP you need an account on stars:

If you have an account on the Stars Server, you can log in directly via SSH and transfer files.

    • Login: From the terminal use the following command

    • ssh yourloginname@stars.uchicago.edu

    • Once your're logged in use cd, ls and pwd to navigate the folder structure. These commands (and a bit more) are documented in Linux Navigation Tutorial and Linux Shell Looking Around Tutorial at linuxcommand.org.

    • File Transfer: From the terminal use the following command to transfer a file to the server

    • scp local/file/path/name yourloginname@stars.uchicago.edu:/remote/file/path/name

    • to transfer a file from the stars server use

    • scp yourloginname@stars.uchicago.edu:/remote/file/path/name local/file/path/name

    • Folder Transfer / Backup: You can also use the rsync command

Data on StarDrive is available on stars: