Troubleshooting guide

Spectral Characteristics

Filter / Grism

Combination

Band R = λ / δλ

(2 pix slit)

Dispersion

(Å/pixel)

R = λ / δλ

(3 pix slit)

JH + JH-grism J 1400 4.69 960

H 1800 4.69 1250

HK + HK-grism H 970 8.42 650

K 1300 8.42 865

JH+ HK-grism J (2

order) 1500 4.4 1000

MOS Plates: 11 positions are available for MOS plates; usually, one position is occupied by a MOS plate

containing a single 3 pixel wide long slit; 3 pixel wide slits are customarily used at the 4-m telescope.

The masks cover approximately ±290 pixels of the chip in the dispersion direction. The unvignetted field of a

mask in its frame is approximately 3.1 × 9.5 arcmin.

The science grade array is offset in the spatial direction with respect to the MOS wheel field of view, which

essentially means that the lower ~70 pixels of a MOS plate will not hit the detector. Lower in this case means

the 70 pixels furthest North if the position angle (PA) is 0º, the 70 pixels furthest East if the PA is 90º, and the

70 pixels furthest South if the PA is 180º. See also Appendix 4: Additional Notes on MOS plates.

Position Angles: The position angle of the long slits and MOS plates matches that of the telescope instrument

rotator. The allowed range is -0.6º to +180º. Small rotational offsets of the long slits and MOS plates are

possible, and required, as the rotator positioning is too coarse for accurate slit positioning.

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 before the MOS wheel. The Camera dewar

contains the Filter, Lyot, and Grism wheels; the Lyot wheel contains Lyot stops for the KPNO 2.1-m and 4-m

telescopes, and for the MMT; the Grism wheel contains the two grisms, two imaging apertures, and the only

truly dark cold stop in the system.

Instrument Control: FLAMINGOS is operated via an ssh connection from either of the MacMinis in the

control room (mayall-2 or mayall-3) to flmn-4m-1a (hereafter referred to as flamingos1a), which is the primary

FLAMINGOS control computer. FLAMINGOS is set up so that all data taking is run from the command line of

flamingos1a using a set of perl scripts

. Flamingos1a is mounted on the right-hand electronics rack with the

instrument, in the Cassegrain cage. A second machine, flamingos1b (flmn-4m-1b) previously mounted in the

rack as a backup data acquisition machine, is nonfunctional and has been removed.

Data Acquisition & Storage: While observing, all data will be located on flamingos1a in

/data/4mguest/<UTDATE>/. If you type df -h, you can see how much of the 68 GB disk space is available;

similarly if you type du -h, you can see how much disk space is used in the present directory (the -h option is

for human readable format, and it prints values out with KB, MB, and GB suffixes as appropriate). Because ftp

on flamingos1a is slow, it would be very time-consuming to move the data to another computer at the end of the

night, so we utilize a mirror script on the MacMini to continuously copy over the data during the night.

1 Located in /usr/local/flamingos/, in the directories perl_all_tel/, perl_kp4m/, flamingos.headers.lut/, and

flamingos_modules/.

FLAMINGOS@4-m, Ver. 2.39, 2013 April 23 Page 4 of 47