Logging In, What It Looks Like, and How to Get Out

Logging on

Mini-Mosaic is controlled from the WIYN computer pearl; its terminal is sitting in the corner of the control room. The login name is wiyn_ccd; the password should be posted on the terminal.

What Windows Go Where: What Your Desktop Looks Like

Once past this hurdle, the astronomer will find numerous windows have been opened. Among them are:

On monitor 1:

ARCON Acquisition (startACQU) window. This is the window in which all your commands for running the ARCON should be issued. When the system first starts up, it will ask you if you wish to ``synchronize the parameters". Always answer ``yes" to this question, unless of course you know something we don't. If you to exit this window, you must do so by choose ``End ARCON session" from the root menu.

Arcon_user window. This is in some ways a misnomer; this window is primarily the source of technical information about what the controller is doing. Some observers prefer to close (but don't quit!) this window.

A long skinny window containing the list of the filters. The one in use will be high-lighted; although it looks tempting, you cannot change filters by clicking on a filter name.

fsa Motor. This is another hardware technobabble window; one could close it, and inspect it if there seems to be a problem changing filters.

ARCON Status. This is a very useful window that reports dewar and camera temperatures, CCD status, number of pictures remaining in a series, current picture number, and so on.

Large green 0. This window is the exposure time counter; during an integration it will count down.

IRAF Reduction window. Parameters for this window are kept separately from those in the acquistion window.

Various minor windows: clock, CPU meter, virtual desktop icon, read-only console window.

On monitor 2:

DCA Console Monitor. The Data Capture Agent monitor tells reports the image name, the image type, the filter, the data directory, what percentage of the image has been captured from the ARCON controllers, and even how much disk space you're using.

ximtool. The basic image display window appears on this second monitor.

Logging Out

  The cleanest and safest way of exiting is the following:

1. In the background root menu, click on ``End ARCON session".
2. Type logout in each of your remaining IRAF windows.
3. Move the mouse to a blank area of the screen and hold down the right mouse button; select ``Quit Windows".

We recommend that you log out at least once a day. Unix memory management is such that allocated blocks of memory are never truly freed for reuse until a process dies. IRAF, on the other hand, will arrange to keep a process around indefinitely (even after a task exits) to avoid the rather stiff startup penalties that sometimes apply.