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Queue Scheduling - A Progress Report (1Dec93)
(from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 36, 1 December 1993)

One of the new observing modes with which we have been experimenting is
queue scheduling. During the summer, we "queue scheduled" observations
for a number of proposers on three of our small telescopes. This
project was quite successful for us, and we were able to explore a lot
of operational issues. The program was also successful from the
proposers' point of view. We obtained observations for 23 of the 35
projects submitted that had high grades. We were able to complete about
one-half of the former.

One of the things that we discovered is that you have to have a large
enough pool of observations and observational requirements in order to
make effective use of all the telescope time. For instance, almost all
the proposals for observations on the 0.9-m required photometric skies.
As it turned out, there was almost no photometric time during the
nights we were observing on the 0.9-m, and so, after completing the few
programs which did not require photometric conditions, there was not
much left to do.

We had a positive experience with the electronic proposal form, which
was done with a LaTeX template, assembled by Chris Biemesderfer. In
fact, this is so clearly an improvement to the process of applying for
telescope time, we are now developing a similar form for the regular
proposals.  All additional correspondence with the proposers was
handled by e-mail--and some finding charts for spectroscopic
observations were sent as FITS files by anonymous ftp.

One of the most difficult decisions we had to make was how far to take
the data reduction.  We saw that there were subtleties in the data
taking which might be important to the data reduction. Thus, it was
desirable to carry out the reduction to the point where we would not
have to explain the details of the data taking to the recipient of the
data. In fact, it would have been nice to send proposers completely
reduced data. In practice, this turned out to be impossible, and, at
least for GoldCam and the 0.9-m direct data, we sent partially reduced
data. The raw data was also made available, of course.

During the current fall semester, we are running a small queue program
on the 0.9-m telescope. We have scheduled five highly ranked proposals
during two periods in October and November. We had hoped for a more
ambitious program, but we found many people who had submitted
successful proposals were reluctant to have their observations queue
scheduled. We believe that the efficiency of the telescopes can really
be improved by scheduling in this way, and so we are exploring various
options which would make the queue program more attractive. Among the
possible changes we are exploring are 1) allowing proposals to stay in
the queue from semester to semester or year to year until the
observations are successfully obtained, 2) scheduling regular blocks of
"queue" time which would be filled by proposals which could be
submitted every quarter or even more frequently, and 3) setting up an
"eavesdropping" mode--in which the proposer would be informed when his
or her observations were being made and could participate
electronically. We are investigating the reactions of potential users
to these options through our questionnaire and the town meeting at the
January AAS meeting.

Who actually does the queue observing? We have drawn on both the
downtown and mountain staffs for this project; participants have
included Taft Armandroff, Todd Boroson, Ed Carder, Jim DeVeny, Di
Harmer, Jen Hedden, Kurt Loken, Phil Massey, Alex McDonald, Caty
Pilachowski, Mike Pierce, Ata Sarajedini, Bill Schoening, Dave Silva,
Dave Summers, Bridget Watts, Daryl Willmarth, and Mike Wise.

Todd Boroson, David De Young,
Taft Armandroff, Caty Pilachowski

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