NIRSPEC BASICS

ET Meeting Thursday July 19, 2001


0: The Motivation: What It's Good For (a couple of examples)

0.1: High Redshift Objects

0.2: Comets and Chemistry

1: The Hardware: What's What and Where It Comes Out

1.1: Optical Path: Slightly Over-simplified Schematic and the The Gory Details

1.2: Physical layout of instrument

1.3: The Calibration Unit: what's inside it, and front, side, top, and inside views

1.4: The right rack: Location of power switch (all 8 green lights must be ON!) and NOTE: procedure on web page

1.5: The center rack: Lakeshore temperature monitor, SCSI/Fiber converter "Black Boxes", and PXL controller

1.6: The other side: interconnections and hoses

1.7: Location of glycol connections and NOTE: glycol flow can turn off power!

1.8: What is cold, how cold, and why: The CCR Compressors and The Cold Heads

1.9: Data Products: SCAM Images, SPEC in high-resolution mode, and SPEC in low-resolution mode

1.10: The Other Guider: the PXL guide camera images

2: The Observers' Software: How They Use It

2.1: Left monitor and middle monitor have all the NIRSPEC GUI's. Right monitor is free for guider eavesdrop, FACSUM, XMET, etc., but beware of colormap conflicts on 8-bit right monitor.

2.2: XNIRSPEC has 3 windows: Motor control, SPEC control, and SCAM control. Note that motor control panel also supplies dewar temperature information and status reports on motor moves (but not by misleading twirlies!).

2.3: Image Rotator GUI only comes up when the observer invokes night-time mode. It allows observers to choose only two modes:

2.4: Quicklook has 2 windows: SPEC Display and SCAM Display. Both include features for plotting, image arithmetic, color map and display adjustment, file opening for old images, etc. SCAM Display also includes various ways to interact with the DCS and move the telescope.

2.5: Slitnod widget (a/k/a Slitmove widget) only comes up when observer invokes night-time mode. Essentially a handpaddle limited to the reference frame of the slit. Handy for nudging star into slit, or nodding along slit by hand.

2.6: Echelle Format Simulator a/k/a EFS. Would take a week to describe all the features. Can use it to:

3: Operations: Guiding

3.1: Layout and physical arrangement of the two guiders.

3.2: SCAM and The Rotator. Just like HIRES, LRIS, ESI, the pointing origins on SCAM are always on the same SCAM pixels: REF and SLIT mainly.

3.3: PXL and The Rotator. Unlike any other guider we have, the pointing origin (REFA) on the PXL moves as the rotator moves.

3.4: Common Gotcha: SCAM guiding and waimea reboots, "Can't open FITS file...". If waimea is rebooted during the night due to a crash, have the observer or IS do the following on waimea after restart:

4: Operations: Malign

4.1: Nominal magnitude star works fine in K or H (Nirspec-5) filters. Always ask observers to put in one or the other.

4.2: Software supplies a surface plot to check for saturation.

4.3: Send stack? OK! Usually not necessary if small, but it is OK to send stack for NIRSPEC.

4.4: Common gotcha: error messages about "no DCS keywords" in header. Almost always due to observer failing to enable night-time mode.