Observing with WiFeS

Weather 

• http://aat-ops.anu.edu.au/AATdatabase/met.html 

• http://www.skippysky.com.au/Compact/Australia/Compact_Oz_Coonabarabran.html

• http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR691.loop.shtml#skip 

• http://satview.bom.gov.au/ 

• http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/metdata/ 

• http://aat-ops.anu.edu.au/skycam/weather-large.html 

• https://clearoutside.com/forecast/-31.27/149.06 

To check visibility of source 

http://catserver.ing.iac.es/staralt/index.php 

 https://whatsup.icrar.org/

https://github.com/CheerfulUser/mjo_staralt 

Finding chart maker

One way is here.

How to observe using WiFeS when it is robotic:

You will need to contact Ian Price at ANU to have an account set up and allocated to a particular observing sequence. Ian will then give you the details to access the observing tool that you can then use to submit observations.

Some important notes:

The system implements a hard Target-of-Opportunity (ToO) mechanism. An observation submitted as a hard ToO will be executed as soon as possible, aborting an active observation in the process. The system also supports a soft pseudo-ToO scheme. The latter does not interrupt the current observation, it merely elevates the scheduling rank of the semi-urgent observation so that it is very likely to be the next observation selected. This is more efficient on the whole but there are trade-offs. A pseudo-ToO...

  * can be interrupted by a hard ToO.

  * isn't guaranteed to run next - though it probably will unless there are other pseudo-ToOs pending.

The up-side of opting for pseudo-ToO is not only altruism. Urgency is always a trade against having the best observing conditions and pseudo-ToOs can choose to prefer to wait for a lower airmass. All of these options are realised by the numeric value of the obs priority that is set per-observation in the observation preparation tool.

  * 1000 -> hard ToO (only allowed if ToO privileges were granted by the TAC)

  * 500-999 -> elevated priority without a preference for low airmass.

  * 1-499 -> elevated priority with low airmass constraint.

  * 0 -> no elevated priority (implicitly strives for good observing conditions).

The priority elevation factor has a range of 500, with large values biasing towards urgency and against the factors that improve data quality (observing conditions). If urgency is important then go for the high end of the range within the airmass limit category you are willing to accept (The 'low airmass' category is currently applied as the midpoint of the observation constrained to |HA|<1.5hrs, not as airmass).

For non-ToO observations the user priority is a bias that trades the likelihood of observation earlier in the quarter against observing conditions. The TAC does not oversubscribe the allocation so you're better off with a user priority of zero in the long run.

Observations can be submitted at any time during the quarter, but obviously the system can only select from the observations that have been submitted. An under-populated database of observations is bad for the efficient utilization of the system as a whole. It is important that non-ToO observations are prepared and submitted in advance of the start of the quarter. As a rough guide you should have at least 50% of your observations prepared before the start of the quarter and most of them by the end of the first month. Changes are possible at any time, so you're not locked-in by being prepared. Systematic "Just-in-Time" preparation/submission should be for ToO targets only.

Once your observations have been observed, you will then need to reduce the data using pyWiFeS. For more info, go here.