To take darks

1. During the night, keep a list of what combinations of DIT, NDIT, and observing mode you have used, since you have to take darks for every combination.

2. Darks need not be taken with the dome lights OFF -- but be sure that the "CLOSED/BLIND" mask is in. The telescope should not be moved during darks.

3. type endofnight at unix prompt, or manually put the following in:

MASK IN FPU,

Mask to use: #3 CLOSED/BLIND

FW1 = BLIND

FW2 = BLIND

also have

cal unit out

flexure compensation off

Recall you have to hit " COMMIT INSTRUMENT SET UP" to change instrument set up

3. Edit the dark_int.txt

For AZ, there is a subdirectory ~/AZ/Jan2011/Darks containing dark_int.txt, clean.txt and DoDarks.txt.

To set up these files from scratch, log on to obs2 or obs3,
the typing ssh observer@lucifer:
( you have to be sitting at one of the Sun consoles)

then you go to
cd /home/observer/ObservationScripts

and find these 3 files.

In the example below, the command
DARK =mer 150 2 5

takes 5 darks with exposure time = 150 sec and 2 coadds

[08.01.-02:07]observer@lucifer:~/ObservationScripts> more dark_int.txt
[START_READOUT_SETUP]
DIT =2 # any positive value, no blanks
NDIT =15 # any positive value, no blanks
NEXPO =5 # as NDIT
ROE_MODE =o2dcr # o2dcr|o2scr|msr|mer|lir
SAVE_MODE =integrated # integrated|cube|normal
#SAVE_PATH =/data/luci/20091216 # absolute save path
#FILENAME =luci_20091216_Darkb_ # root of the filenames
[END_READOUT_SETUP]

[START_OBSERVING_SETUP]
FLUSH_DETECTOR
#DARK =o2dcr 2 1 5 <---- this is commented out by #
#DARK =o2dcr 4 1 5
#DARK =o2dcr 7 1 5
DARK =mer 150 2 5
DARK =o2dcr 15 6 5
DARK =o2dcr 15 4 5
DARK =o2dcr 30 4 5
#DARK =mer 240 1 5
#DARK =o2dcr 2 15 5
#DARK =o2dcr 5 1 5
#DARK =mer 30 2 5
[END_OBSERVING_SETUP]

4. Then to take the darks, type

source DoDarks.txt

[08.01.-02:11]observer@lucifer:~/ObservationScripts> more DoDarks.txt
#executeLUCIScript.sh dark.txt
executeLUCIScript.sh dark_int.txt
executeLUCIScript.sh clean.txt

This takes the darks and cleans the detector.

5. Look at the darks:

Every so often one or two of the readouts goes bonkers, and values in the dark are several
thousand for those quadrants, instead of 1-10. Need to check for these and throw them
out. This happens for the first few hours after Lucifer is turned on.

See attached screen shots.

J. Bechtold, F. Bian Jan 2010. Revised J. Bechtold Jan. 2011, April 2011