Observing tools

Some tools to control the weather parameters such as humidity, temperature, wind velocity, scintillation have been developed so that observer can be aware of possible high-risk atmospheric conditions and can evaluate the seeing (mostly in lower layers) during observations.

Activate these programs in screen 2 (see the section Screen cameras in the preliminars. (There is an icon in screen 4 named x2xFocus that you should click on to enable the mouse work in screen 2).

Open a terminal window Go to the directory

cd /home/dot/guus/3dd3/trunk/windgui/

and finally launch every program as follows:

Seeing monitor

./windgraph sci2_dc sci2_ac

Green line shows the mean intensity vs time. Red line shows the scintillation vs time.

How to interpret these lines?

If a clear day, the green line should smoothly increase during the morning and decrease during afternoon.
Red line normally starts below -30 and starts to rise up a little bit during the first sunny hours. Measurements are better reliable after 9:00 UT. Seeing in lower layers starts to be acceptable when the red line goes below the value -25, but in fact images can still present differential motion due to a small isoplanatic patch (high seeing).
Green line start to show hunches (irregularities) when clouds are passing over whereas the red line interrupts (e.g. see the figure above).

Weather Parameters

./windgui

Wind field at the dome

./windfield

Live web cam

Displaying the DOT tower. Open a browser and go to the following address:

http://wcam1

Tuning filters

If you want to tune the line position for the filters click here for more information.

Analog full disk camera DOT

To the focuscomputer (Penelope) is the analog fulldisk camera (old guider) connected. Click on the icon on the desktop.