User`s guide

FLAMINGOS at the MMT
Resolving Powers for 3 pixel slit:
Filter Combination Band R
JH-bandpass + JH-grism J 960
H 1250
HK-bandpass + HK-grism H 650
K 865
Mos Plates: 11 positions are available for Mos plates; at present 1 position is occupied by a Mos-plate shapped
single long slit with width of 3 pixels.
Mechanisms: The Mos dewar contains the Decker and Mos wheels; the Decker wheel contains an imaging
hole, a psuedo dark, and aperture masks to baffle stray light for long slit and mos plates on the Mos wheel. The
Camera dewar contains the filter, lyot, and grism wheel; the lyot wheel contains lyot stops for the KPNO 2.1-m
and 4-m telescopes, and stops for the MMT and Gemini South; the grism wheel contains the two grisms, and
imaging hole, and the only truly dark cold stop in the system.
Instrument Control: The MMT has two computers that the astronomer uses: packrat and cfaguider .
FLAMINGOS is operated via an rsh connection from packrat to flamingos1b, which is the FLAMINGOS
control computer (flamingos1b is mounted on the right-hand electronics rack). All data taking commands are
run from flamingos1b; the data taking commands are all perl scripts (.pl extension). cfaguider's monitor is
used for displaying several windows important for monitoring FLAMINGOS; these windows are started from
packrat, via the xwindows sharing program X2X.
Data Storage: While you are taking data, all data will be located on flamingos1b .
Flamingos' data storage area is /data0/mmtguest/<UTDATE>/.
Packrat's data storage area is /packrat1/scratch/flam/<UTDATE>/.
Data Transport: Brian McLeod and I will setup flamingos1b such that data can be copied directly to packrat as
it is taken; from there it may be transferred to your home institution via ftp, or written to tape. Packrat has a
dds4 tape drive; the MMT web page claims that a DVD-RAM is available, too. Last year a DLT drive was also
available.
Image Size: Each Flamingos frame is 16 MB in size! During a single night of imaging, it is possible to take 8
– 16 GB of data (500 to 1,000 images). Pay attention to disk usage, and bring many tapes for data archiving.
Unix Tips: Many of the command names are quite long. However, if you type a portion of the command and
then hit the TAB key, you will be offered a list of possible completions to the command name. Similarly, the up
arrow key will allow you to go up through the history stack of commands entered on the command line.
Halting A Script: Never type Ctrl-C . It is much safer to suspend a job with Ctrl-Z. Then you can kill a
job by typing jobs, and kill -9 %<job number>. If you are moving a wheel, please just wait for the
wheel to finish motion, and the script to complete, and then try again. If you are taking an image or a sequence
of images, wait until the script starts counting the number of seconds elapsed in the exposure before suspending
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