[fitsbits] INSTRUME and TELESCOP

[Mike Nolan]

> 
>    I'm struggling with this because I'm stuck in the middle between our
>    Spanish station where the astronomers use CLASS and our Australian station
>    where they use ASAP.  We are now setting up a new telescope at Goldstone
>    with a very powerful CASPER-based backend. How do we archive data in a
>    common format?
> 

Aha, now we'll all understand: We have exactly the same problem. Today's
users want class (or whatever), but it's not an archival format. I opine that
you'll need a separate archival format that should follow the standards
papers as closely as possible. If you want, you can try to add keywords
to make class (or whatever) happy, but you're likely to need a converter.
No fun when you're talking a GB/s of data, but there you are. Most of the
reduction programs want something like the TELESCOP keyword, but they're
probably less picky about what's in it. As an example, in our class writer,
I encode the sub-band in the telescope name so that you can sort on it,
since class doesn't really have another way to do that. A few years ago,
we had a class guru visit, and he wrote scripts to fix everything up.

Class and ASAP were developed on opposite sides of the globe in
pre-internet times, and they just don't want quite the same thing, and
don't quite deal with modern data rates. Aips++ was supposed to solve
all this, but it just added one more.


Cheers,

-Mike

-- 
Dr. Michael C. Nolan, Observatory Director
+1 787 878 2612x212 Fax: +1 787 878 1861 nolan at naic.edu
Arecibo Observatory, HC 3 Box 53995, Arecibo, Puerto Rico 00612 USA