The planner's guide is meant to serve as an introduction to people who have accepted the challenge of coordinating EIT observations. A list of the previous planners is available on the Web.
Each planner is on duty for four weeks, and then is nominally on call during the next planner's shift.The EIT planner endorses several responsibilities including:
monitoring the health of EIT ensuring the proper coordination and execution of observing programs reporting the solar activity to the community a limited maintenance of the EIT software and data archive.The planner is responsible for all EIT observations throughout the duration of their shift (including evenings and weekends) unless otherwise arranged. Planning responsibilities generally begin a few weeks before your shift; often JOPs (Joint Observing Programs) require a few weeks of preparation, and will span more than one planning shift. A typical shift starts on a sunday morning and ends a saturday night. However, in order to ensure a smooth transition, the upcoming planner must attend the weekly meeting held the friday preceeding his shift and must starts to monitor the EIT housekeeping data on saturday.
If you have an impending shift, the best way to ensure a smooth transition is to contact the current planner and arrange some practice sessions with her/him. A planner should check the SOHO monthly schedule and the most recent SPWG (Science Planning Working Group) meeting minutes to determine the upcoming observations. A list of JOP descriptions is available. Once the upcoming JOPs are determined, the EIT JOP contacts list assigns an EIT team member to most of the JOPs. The associated team member should be contacted to determine whether EIT will participate in the JOP. Sometimes the turnaround time between EIT team members, planners, and JOP leaders can be a couple of weeks, so it is best to begin discussing the JOP a few weeks in advance.
If you are a new EIT planner, give your contact information (phone number, pager, etc.) to the SOCs. Make also sure htat you have the conatct information of EIT team members.
Finally, in the mailing program on gavroche (see below), change the forward e-mail address to yours so that you recieve the e-mails directed to the EIT planner.
Wether localy or remotely, a lot of the planning job is done on gavroche, the planner's workstation. This machine is used for quick-look reformatting, auto-movie making and a host of other critical tasks. It runs the VMS operating system, with wich most people are not familiar. If you are not sure of what you are doing, ask a more experienced EIT team member.
Check the batch, realtime reformatter program on gavroche: make sure it's still running and restart it if not.
Check recent images: make sure they're present and not severely corrupted. If we are missing an image or a large portion of one, check for station handovers, FOT anomalies, and with operations people to see what may have happened. If the data exist, try reformatting it by restarting the reformatter (see above) with a record number corresponding to a time just prior to the image. The batch reformatting job will reformat all EIT images it finds in the LASCO/EIT science telemetry packets acquired after that record number.
Look at the automatically made movies (remake them manually if something went wrong with the automovie batch jobs) and record any solar phenomena of interest (CME's, Moreton waves, flares, filament eruptions, whatever you think is noteworthy) in the log book so that you can report on the activity since the last planning meeting at today's meeting. This is the only way the daily meeting has of knowing what occurred on the visible hemisphere of the Sun in the last 24 hours, except for sketchy, ground-based reports. You will be expected to make this report at every daily planning meeting.
Status of the sun: monitoring the most recent activity, and knowing the times of recent images are very helpful in daily meetings. Knowing the approximate time of the last 304 and 195 Å images is particularly helpful.
Record phenomena of interest in the log book.
Confirm observing schedule with operators. In the case of sunfied observations, run eit_subfield in IDL and get the exact pixel range for the study.
Discuss with operations specialists the images to be taken during load. Often a full-field image taken at the time of the load helps in determining the pointing of later studies. Sequences are tested during loads too; check with operators to see which sequences require testing, how much time is required for testing, and which dates are available.
If the operators takes a "sample" image during load, check the first image from the sequence to make sure it's the correct region, and that gavroche reformats it properly.
If the observing sequence is in collaboration with another instrument or observatory, find their observing times so that our observing slot coincides with theirs. It may be necessary to request a staggered load time to ensure simultaneous images. Planners for various instruments can be found in the SOHO monthly schedule.
Produce and distribute EIT news to EIT team mailing list (twice a week would be even better).
Attend weekly planning meetings on Friday, just after the daily meeting. Make certain that IAP's have been submitted by Thursday afternoon, in preparation for the Friday meeting. Note that the planner needs to prepare for an upcoming shift the week before the schedule observing shift.
Tuesdays are currently EIT's day to take the minutes at the daily meeting. The typed minutes are to be e-mailed to soc@soc.nascom.nasa.gov.
The EIT planner is now in charge of updating about once a month the calibration lamps database and one routine of the EIT software. Check the Archive and Software section of this guide for a quick how-to.
Engineering Sequence:
Below is a preliminary list of observations and procedures that should be regularly obtained in order to evaluate the health and safety of the instrument.
1) Dark exposures - weekly: 1 20 second, quarterly: series from 1 sec to 1000 sec in steps of 2
2) Exposure time sequence - quarterly, series from 1/32 sec - 20 sec, one wavelength?
3) Calibration lamp exposure - weekly
4) Light leak test - strip across the top image with 284::clear, monitor level - weekly
5) Deep exposure - 6 minutes 195 Ang, monthly, look for 1 arcmin circles, other features
6) Photon transfer curve - need procedure from Russ and Scott, all wavelengths, after bakeout
7) Extended pixel edge response (Charge Transfer Efficiency -CTE) - use cal-lamp, use virtual pixels (1 block) off edge, monthly
8) CCD Bakeout - times are variable, but usually every four months
9) Intercal JOPS - SOHO runs several intercalibration exercises on a monthly basis. Elaine Einfalt has the descriptions of the sequences usually run - the planner should check with the other instrument teams to ensure that the sequence EIT is running is commensurate with the other observations.
Web curator: Frédéric
Auchère
Responsible NASA official: Joseph
B. Gurman, Facility Scientist, Solar Data Analysis Center
joseph.b.gurman@gsfc.nasa.gov
+1 301 286-4767
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Solar Physics Branch / Code 682
Last revised: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 2:32 PM - F. Auchère