Planning Tools

• airmass vs time plot tool from ING LBT coordinates: E longitude[deg] and latitude[deg] and altitude[m] are 250.111 32.7013 3221 Note that this tool assumes that the local time at LBT is 6 hrs behind UT and that daylight savings time is observed, both of which are incorrect. The local time at LBT is always 7 hrs behind UT.
• skycalc (by John Thorstensen): use to compute airmass vs time, object-moon distance, parallactic angle. This is installed on the LBT machines and there is an entry "g" for LBT. Type skycalc to run.
• LBT Almanac for 2007: lists times of sunrise/sunset, morning/evening twilight and moon phase. Computed from Thorstensen's skycalendar.
• altaz.pdf altitude vs azimuth for declinations > -50 degrees and HA in 30 min increments (HA=0 center line at az=180 for objects to the South, and at 0/360 degrees for objects to the North)
• Parallactic Angle: A plot of parallactic angle vs HA (for Palomar, latitude just ~1 deg N of LBT) can be found in "The Importance of Atmospheric Differential Refraction in Spectrophotometry" Filippenko, A. 1982 PASP, 94, 715.

Coordinate conversions

• IDL programs: IDL has the programs, hadec2altaz and altaz2hadec, in its astron library. (A pair of LBT-specific coordinate conversion programs will be written around these, called hd2aa and aa2hd).
• HA-DEC/Alt-Az conversion can be calculated through the web-interface on this Wise Observatory page http://wise-obs.tau.ac.il/~eran/Wise/Util/Horizontal_Coordinates.html.

Display Tools

• ds9: The standard tool used at LBT.
• Starlink/GAIA: Type gaia to run. The GAIA home page at http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~pdraper/gaia/gaia.html includes a complete list of its functionalities. Among these, the abliity to overplot popular catalogs (e.g. GSC, USNO-B1) and to download and display sky images, may be useful to observers.
• for automatic real-time display of LBC images (science and technical chip #1) launch the 2 python scripts:
  • /home/lbcobs/supportscripts/ObserverSupport/Science.py
  • /home/lbcobs/supportscripts/ObserverSupport/Technical_1.py