Bizarro Observation Tactician (obztak)

Bizarro observation tactician (ObzTak) for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at CTIO. Used for the Magellanic Satellites Survey (MagLiteS), the BLanco Imaging of the Southern Sky (BLISS), and the DECam Local Volume Survey (DELVE) (among others...).

Installation

ObzTak is distributed via pip (this may not be the most up-to-date version):

pip install obztak

If you are running for a pre-existing program, you may need to download the observation windows and target fields from a specific release here.

Running

The first step is to run prepare_survey to set up the necessary survey characterization files. Specifically, this script builds a list of survey fields and a list of expected time windows. These files will be written to the current directory by default.

> ./bin/prepare_survey --help
usage: prepare_survey [-h] [-p] [-f FIELDS] [-w WINDOWS]

Decide which fields to observe and time windows to observe.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p, --plot            Plot output. (default: False)
  -f FIELDS, --fields FIELDS
                        List of all target fields. (default:
                        target_fields.txt)
  -w WINDOWS, --windows WINDOWS
                        List of observation windows. (default:
                        observation_windows.txt)

There are two pimary executables: survey_simulator and survey_observer. Both use the same underlying architecture, but the survey_simulator simulates the entire survey while survey_observer is used to simulate only a specific chuck of the survey and create an output json file. Both have the -p option for real-time plotting.

> ./bin/survey_simulator --help
usage: survey_simulator [-h] [-v] [-p] [-fields FIELDS] [-w WINDOWS] [-d DONE]
                        [-o OUTFILE]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         Output verbosity.
  -p, --plot            Plot output.
  -fields FIELDS, --fields FIELDS
                        List of all target fields.
  -w WINDOWS, --windows WINDOWS
                        List of observation windows.
  -d DONE, --done DONE  List of fields that have been observed.
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Save output fields surveyed.

usage: survey_observer [-h] [-v] [-p] [-fields FIELDS] [-w WINDOWS] [-d DONE]
                       [-o OUTFILE] [--tstart TSTART] [--tstop TSTOP]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         Output verbosity.
  -p, --plot            Plot output.
  -fields FIELDS, --fields FIELDS
                        List of all target fields.
  -w WINDOWS, --windows WINDOWS
                        List of observation windows.
  -d DONE, --done DONE  List of fields that have been observed.
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Save output fields surveyed.
  --tstart TSTART       Start time for observation.
  --tstop TSTOP         Stop time for observation.

Development

To clone repository go to the directory where you want to work

git clone https://github.com/kadrlica/obztak.git

To keep your local copy up to date, pull changes from the remote repository to your local copy

git pull --all 

To commit an update

# git add command moves changes from the working directory to the staging area
git add example.txt 
# git commit takes the staged snapshot and commits it to the project history
git commit -m 'my comments' 
# git push moves a local branch or series of commits to main repository
git push -u origin master 

To work on a specific branch

# Example with the maglites branch...
git fetch origin maglites
# setup a new branch to track origin/maglites
git checkout -b maglites origin/maglites 
# push maglites branch (which is tracking origin/maglites) back to GitHub
git push origin maglites 

For more details on branches, see here.