Troubleshooting guide

-h option is for human readable format, and it prints values out with KB, MB, and GB suffixes as appropriate).
Data Analysis: An IRAF session will be running on flamingos1a. Simple analysis tasks such as quick image
arithmatic, image stacking, and image statistics can be performed with it while taking data. There are no
pipeline reduction packages installed on flamingos1a for imaging or spectroscopy data. If you wish to reduce
data simultaneously while taking data, we recommend that you transfer it to nutmeg, and do so there. However,
if the night is shot by clouds, several non-distribution IRAF packages have been installed on flamingos1a (e.g.
xdimsum) which may be useful . Let us know if you find any problems.
Data Display: FLAMINGOS images are automatically displayed in ds9, into frame buffers 1 and 2, with odd
images in buffer 1 and even images in buffer 2. Other noteworthy points:
ds9 toggles the frame before loading the newest image, so you sometimes can briefly see the previous
image in that buffer. You can choose to tile any of the buffers.
The image name appears in the file name box in ds9; data values and pixel coordinates are also shown.
ds9 can read the rudimentary World Coordinate Information (WCS) in the FLAMINGOS header, and it
displays the WCS compass arrows.
ds9 also has some very useful tools such as rulers. You should spend some time familiarizing yourself
with ds9 if you are mostly used to ximtool.
No other display program is available for automatically displaying the images as they are taken.
IRAF can load images into ds9 with the display command, however, loading images directly into ds9
(with the File Open buttons) is recommended, as it preserves the ds9 ability to scale the images (using
IRAF display suspends this ability).
Data Transport: Observers are responsible for removing their data from flamingos1a and transporting it to their
home institution. All data will be removed from flamingos1a immediately after your observing run. The
filesystem on flamingos1a is cross-mounted to the KPNO 4-m computer nutmeg, to which we recommend that
you first move the data. This is easily done by running the script Start.autocopy.4m.nutmeg.sh
(described in more detail in §III. Nightly Startup Tasks) on flamingos1a. Once the data are on nutmeg, you can
write it to nutmeg's DDS4 tape drive or DVD writer. Alternatively, you can ftp/scp the data to your home
institution or to your laptop; such data transport to your home institution may be quite slow, however (recently
the transfer rate from azure, at the 2.1-m, to Florida was only ~220 KB/s). For taping, we recommend that you
first compress, gzip, or bzip the data before writing it to tape with tar.
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 and/or DVDs
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. A
familiarity with basic unix commands (e.g ~, ls, cd, mkdir, rm, rmdir, cp, mv, history, df, du, ps, ctrl-c, ctrl-z,
jobs, kill, grep, wc, tar, mt, ssh, scp, ftp and the up and down arrow keys) is advised.
FLAMINGOS@4-m, Ver. 2.34, 2006 Apr 04 Page 5 of 44