SHOCnWonder

This page contains additional information for the "new SHOC" aka "shocnwonder" that is now permanently mounted on the 74-inch as a secondary instrument via the 74-inch "Instrument Selector" so user should first familiarise themselves with the "Instrument Selector" wiki: wiki-link.

All the hardware for the new SHOC system is new but the underlying control software, GUI, service startup instructions, and data-folder structures etc. are identical to the old SHOC systems so user should also first familiarise themselves with the old SHOC wiki if they are not already regular SHOC users: wiki-link.

• Camera: Andor iXon 888 #BV USB3 , 1024 × 1024px CCD, 13 μm pixels (CCD performance test sheet)
• Plate scale: 0.16 arcsec/px
• Field of view: 2.7' × 2.7' (the new system also has a focal reducer so the FoV-width is roughy double that of the old system)
• Filters:

  Filter Slide A: U,B,V,R,I

  Filter Slide B: Currently unpopulated but eventually will have u', g', r', i', z'

GUI url (onsite or via VPN access only): http://shocnwonder.suth.saao.ac.za:5000/ OR http://shoc74in.suth.saao.ac.za:5000/

username: shoc74in

password: the regular "shoc74in" user password

There is an automated log being generated as files appear on disk by scraping the fits headers:

https://www.saao.ac.za/~sbp/74in_SHW_ObsLogs/

As with the old SHOC systems, data can be copied as follow:

• • Open a shell on your local PC (Putty if you're using Windows or a bash/tcsh/sh if on Mac or Linux)
  • Copy the data using the following command:

       rsync -avzP shoc74in@shoc74in.suth.saao.ac.za:"/data/74in/shw/<YYYY>/<MMDD>/*.fits" /LocalFilePath
         ---- the password is that for the shoc74in accounts

• NOTE 1: if the rsync command fails, try it WITHOUT the wildcard (*) and specify a specific file. Some rsync programs apparently do not support this function.
• NOTE 2: data is also backed-up at the end of the night and on a daily basis to the "astro2015" servers so data can also be accessed with the same folder structure from there.

For users that wish to run scripts (e.g continuously take exposures while cycling a filter sequence), we do not support the old scripting method via the GUI anymore. In fact, on the new system it doesn;t work at all so don;t even try.

We have developed a new much more stable command line method to run scripts. The instructions are as follow:

• • a
  • b