Defining an RTS2 observing script for a target

May 4 2018

Observing script definitions are stored in the bigpop:~rts2obs/.rts2scripts directory.

Each script is a json file named by the name of the object, eg if the object is Sisyphus, the file is Sisyphus.json.

Copy an existing file to get the format right. It's a json file, which is a series of key:value pairs, and can include nested keys. Here's an example:

{
  "name": "Sisyphus",
  "obs_info": [
  {
    "filter": "R",
    "amount": 2,
    "exptime": 300,
  }
  ],
  "ra": "14:33:19.9",
  "dec": "41:16:03.4",
  "type": "UVOT",
  "id": 1243,
  "requeue": 100
}

This defines an observation that will take 2x 300sec exposures in the R filter and will be re-queued after an interval of 100 seconds.

If you screw up the formatting of one of these files (for example missing quotes, or missing comma at end of line), RTS2 will emit error messages in rts2-mon and may stop. If it stops and doesn't restart, try putting rts2-mon on standby, clearing the queue, repopulating it, and activating it again in rts2-mon.

To stop the requeueing, run rts2-queue --queue requeue --clear. You will likely have to wait to be between exposures when something appears in the "requeue" queue (check with rts2-queue). Or edit the json file to remove the requeue.