Australia Telescope National Facility

Monitoring Observations

Once the setting up is complete, there is often little to do during actual observing it is common for observers to spend most of their observing time processing data and writing the next paper.

However, there are a number of tasks that observers should run and any warning messages should be checked to ensure that there aren't any problems.

Assistance: Assistance is a task run on xbones that regularly checks a number of monitor points to confirm that there aren't any problems, and will 'beep' if it finds an incongruity. It is important to ensure that assistance is running in a terminal close enough to warn you of problems. To do this:

xbones> assistance

Assistance Commands that allow assistance to be set to ignore known problems:

assistance> i [#] ignores the #th error message (default is the first message)
assistance> s calls up the setup menues

Monica: Monica is the java replacement (and much more) of camon. See Monica Documentation for information on downloading and installing monica on your machine.

Camon: Camon is a terminal display of monitor information that is run on xbones. Camon's functionality is gradually being replaced by monica.
To run camon:

xbones> camon

Information is collected together on pages. To view a list of pages:

camon> dir

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Handing over and Archiving >>