A question that has plagued me for quite some time, as I prepare my EVLA proposal:
Do you all know of a tool to find the rise/set times and elevations of radio sources? My favorite tool for seeing the trajectory of an object through the sky is 'airchart' in IRAF, but unfortunately IRAF assumes you are an optical astronomer and only tracks your sources through the nighttime. Anyone know of something similar for all 24 hours? (the GMRT has one, but it assumes the GMRT's latitude, which is rather different than the VLA's).
Friday, September 25, 2009
"Air Mass Chart" for Radio Observations?
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Juergen Ott says to use "ASTRO" from GILDAS. I have never used it but he says it's great. Good luck!
Cool, thanks Adrienne!
I actually just wrote up a quick IDL program that takes an ASCII file of source names, RAs, and Dec and plots up the sources' elevations as a function of time (over 24 hours) for a specified observatory and date.
You can find it at my website.
Of course it is cludgily written and I make no guarantees about it, but so far I'm finding it handy.
Oh-- the inputs for latitude, longitude, elevation, time zone are set to the VLA in the version of elev.pro linked here. You could of course change them as you see fit.
This might be worth asking either the PST or the CASA crew to create a tool to do this in the future, especially if they are going to continue with this source group stuff.
Doesn't sched do this? Makes pretty plots, too, and shows you the uptimes for each antenna you want in your observation.
What is sched? Sounds good!
Here's the sched webpage
Sched is a scheduling tool for VLBI arrays, although it has some useful features that are handy for any kind of ground-based observation planning. It knows about telescopes that are routinely used in global VLBI observations, including the VLA.
I use Harvey Liszt's HAzEl program at http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~hliszt/programs.html
Runs on DOS, getting harder to find on scientists' machines. Need one for the iPhone or Droid (I think Harvey wrote one for the Palm but it isn't on his page).
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