NIRES uses an IDL based quicklooktool (QL). There is one QL for the slit viewing camera (SVC) and another for the spectrometer detector (H2RG). Thus, the SVC QL responds to keywords for nids whereas the QL for the H2RG responds to keywords issued to the nsds.

The QL in general use keywords to monitor when an image has been completed. It also uses a combination of keywords to check the origin of the image to be displayed:

go: reads the most recent image from the outdir

test: reads the most recent test image from /tmp

display: reads a specified image from the outdir

In order for the software to identify the correct image to be displayed, only one of the keywords must be active. This is determined by a sequence of value change from 1 -> 0. For instance, to display a test image there must be a transition from test=1 to test=0 while both go=0 and display=0.

If the QL stops updating images, one can restart the QL. This procedure does not stop taking images.