When it is time to take over, check on the portal and chat with the previous observer or observatory staff and ask if it is ok to get going. The Duty Astronomer should be on hand to help inexperienced observers set up their observations.
The main observing program that the observer interacts with is caobs.
caobs usually runs in a black screen with yellow writing in the xbones
VNC session. The program cacor is the interface to the correlator. cacor
commands can be executed for caobs by prefixing the command with corr [command].
Other programs that observers need to use include spd, vis and MoniCA.
For details on using these programs see Appendix A, Appendix B, Appendix C, Appendix D and Appendix E.
To start observing, load a schedule with a strong calibrator into caobs and drive to the source:
caobs> set file
| loads the schedule file | |
caobs> track # | drives the telescope to scan # in the schedule file |