SADT: Download and Installation

The latest version of the Survey Area Definition Tool (SADT) is available for Scientific Linux running Java 1.6 or higher. It is known to work also under other Linux flavours, but not all have been tested. As a Java application it should also run under Unix, Mac OS X, or MS Windows operating systems running Java 1.6 or higher, but no support is guaranteed on other systems.

Preliminary requirements

Before downloading SADT, please make sure of the following:

  1. The java executable needs to be found automatically by SADT for it to run correctly. You must thus make sure that the path to Java is included in your $PATH  environment variable. A simple check can be made using the command "which java" from a terminal window. Also make sure that you are running the correct version of Java. As mentioned at the top of this page, this should be Java 1.6 or higher. The version of java can be verified with the command "java -version".
  2. Install the instrument package(s) you need before running the SADT installation script! The packages are needed by SADT. See the instructions below and the corresponding download links.

Installing SADT and Instrument Packages

  1. Download the following tarball:

    Then download one or both of the instrument packages below, to the same directory as SADT was downloaded:

  2. Go to the directory where you saved the files. At this point you should have a gzipped tar file in your current directory. Unpack it by executing:

    gunzip -c sadt-5.1.0.tar.gz | tar xvf -

    This will create a directory called sadt-5.1.0. You may now remove the gzipped tar file:

    rm sadt-5.1.0.tar.gz

  3. Unpack the downloaded instrument packages to the SADT instruments directory, e.g.

    unzip VIRCAM-109.nn-yyyymmdd.zip -d sadt-5.1.0/instruments/

  4. Go into the directory and execute the provided installation script:

    cd sadt-5.1.0
    ./sadt_install.sh

  5. Follow the instructions on the screen. You will be asked to give the location where you have installed the instrument package(s) for VIRCAM and/or OmegaCAM. If you followed the above instructions then the installation script should find them automatically.

Running SADT

Assuming that you have successfully installed SADT, you can now run the tool using the command <install-dir>/sadt-5.1.0/bin/sadt -c <vst|vista>

Choose the command-line option according to the instrument for which you are preparing observations ('-c vst' for OmegaCAM, '-c vista' for VIRCAM).

For more information about how to use the tool to prepare your observations, check out our cookbooks:

 

Important notice: the instrument package used by SADT has to be the same one as in p2. The instrument package has to be installed on your computer first. If the instrument package version changes (e.g. new period), you can get the new version from the present page. You can download it and unpack it on your machine.
You now have to ensure that SADT also points to the directory where you installed it. One way to do it is to remove SADT from your machine, download the updated tarball and re-run the installation of the tool as described above. Alternatively, you can edit the following configuration files: <install-dir>/sadt-5.1.0/cfg/vista/sadt.cfg. <install-dir>/sadt-5.1.0/cfg/vst/sadt.cfg. In each of these files please edit the following line (examples): INSTRUMENT_PACKAGE_PATH=/home/User/tools/sadt-5.1.0/instruments/VIRCAM-xx.yy/ INSTRUMENT_PACKAGE_PATH=/home/User/tools/sadt-5.1.0/instruments/OMEGACAM-xx.zz/ where xx.yy (or xx.zz) is the version number e.g. VIRCAM-109.nn for period P109 EPOCH_TOBE_OBSERVED = 2022.5 to point to the correct path to the latest version of the instrument package and to correct the epoch.

Instrument selector

This page is specific to Public Surveys on the VST and VISTA telescopes.

SADT