Information about KPNO Alternate Observing Modes

You must have internet access at your home institution to use this service.

Automatic FTP data transfer to a computer at your institution

After each exposure each image is passed to a queue that automatically transfers it to your computer using FTP. This process operates in the background and will not affect observing efficiency.

The raw FITS data will be automatically compressed using STScI's hcompress, which is available for Unix and VMS systems from ftp://stsci.edu/software/hcompress, and also from NOAO. Due to limited bandwidth off the mountain, we are not able to make this service available to all users, only those requiring immediate transmission of their data for their scientific program.

Note that a raw image from a 2K X 2K chip is about 8.5 megabytes in size. A typical night's observing may result in fifty or a hundred (or more) images, depending on your program. One hundred such images are only slightly under a gigabyte (uncompressed). One gigabyte takes 7 solid hours to transfer over Kitt Peak's 400 kbps fractional T1 link, assuming there is no other traffic and that the mountain link is the bottleneck. A single 2K CCD image will take 3.5 minutes to transfer. Plan accordingly. Is there also sufficient disk space on the receiving end?

Questions about this service should be directed to Rob Seaman (rseaman@noao.edu, (520) 318-8248).