Purpose

The tellTracker monitor is a plugin to the calChecker monitor. It is developed and maintained by QC Garching. It tracks the completeness of time-critical telluric calibrations for all science OBs of the indicated date.

This plugin is only enabled for certain instruments with red or infrared spectroscopy. When enabled, you find it linked to the main calChecker output like this:

Rules

For all configured science data types, a matching telluric standard star is searched for. Matching is based on header information only. Unlike calChecker, the tellTracker accepts matches only for the same night. No quality information can be taken into account. This means that for instance a saturated telluric standard star cannot be recognized as such and will be used by the tool for a formally correct match.

After evaluation of the formal matches, two constraints are evaluated:

• the time constraint,
• the airmass constraint.

The configured values are indicated.

All configured science files are evaluated. This is generally a subsection of all science files measured during the night, because:

• there might be data types that are not configured for tellTracker (e.g. XSHOOTER UVB: they do not require a telluric standard star);
• science files with 60.A PROG_IDs are suppressed.

Results

Results are displayed in terms of flags, in the last column RESULT. Like the calChecker, the tellTracker has three flags: OK, NOK, MISS:

• OK is displayed if both constraints are fulfilled.
• NOK is displayed if a match is found but at least one constraint is violated (time or airmass). Preference is given to the time constraint.The violation is marked yellow, the compliance is marked green.
• MISS is displayed in red if no match could be found in the night. Matches to other nights are not considered.

NOK or MISS flags are further analyzed in the last column. Here, a label LEFT+79 indicates that 79 minutes are still left (defined by the time constraint) for taking a new telluric standard which would then improve the NOK or MISS flag to OK. A label LOST-13 indicates that the time window has already expired, but still it might be reasonable to take a standard star, e.g. in order to improve a MISS to a NOK case. A label LOST (without a number) indicates that there is no way to improve the result since the night is over.

Issues. An issue is defined as a NOK or MISS case. All issues, if any, are collected in the top part. That table is intended to provide a list of TBD telluric standards to take. It is aggregated per combination of OBS_ID and setup. If a certain science OB has two different setups (e.g. XSHOOTER: 0.9x11_NIR and 100k/1pt/hg_0.9x11_VIS) and a total of 10 science files, there will be two entries in the issues section, one for the NIR and one for the VIS setup. If there are three OBs with two different setups with missing telluric calibration, there will be 6 entries in the issue table since the OBs might belong to different pointings and therefore to different airmass values.

The issues section is split into two parts, one for the recoverable issues (NOK+LEFT; MISS+LEFT; MISS+LOST) and one for the non recoverable issues (NOK+LOST). The first section should be used for scheduling the next telluric standard, the second section for OB comments or grades in the nightlog. The issue table has columns LST, RA and DEC to be used for input in the telluric star tool. The column UT is a short version of the ARCFILE column in the overview.

Overview. The overview table is complete for all science files of the night. It has the same columns as the issues table, plus a few more ( ARCFILE, and DATA_TYPE). This table has the science and, for orientation, also the telluric standard stars listed.

All tables are sortable. Press Shift key for multiple column sorting. Default sorting is by UT (issues) and ARCFILE (overview). Restore default sorting with the browser refresh button. The overview table is also searchable. Enter e.g.an OBS_ID to display only files for that OB, or 'TELL03' to display that particular TELL star and all science files which go with it. In the overview table you could also toggle columns like AIRM and DATA_TYPE.

You may find it useful to switch the browser refresh off for that kind of analysis (otherwise it will automatically refresh after 5 minutes).

Finally there is an extra result page ("all matches") which lists per ARCFILE all possible matches (not just the best one as on the main page). This might be useful to analyze association issues or issues with saturated TELL stars (then you can see if there is a match to another TELL star which you know is not saturated).

If an unrecoverable issue has been found for the current last night, this is marked on the tellTracker tab as !.

Update information and documentation

Last update: timestamp of creation of this page (UT)

Last header: name of last header file currently available; compare this timestamp to 'Last update' to see if monitor is up-to-date

Frequency: The tool is scheduled by a cronjob and is running during the Paranal night, from about 22:00 UT until about 11:00 UT, every 15 minutes.