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Scheduling Blocks

Scheduling Blocks contain most of the information that is required to run the observations and are therefore very complicated. The remainder of this chapter will describe in detail the contents of an SB and how the various components fit together to produce a valid observation. Indeed, the OT's validation function is also available at Phase 2 and should be routinely checked to ensure that the project will submit without problems to the ALMA archive. As usual, submission will not be possible for any project that does not pass validation.

When clicking on the Scheduling Block node in the Project tree, the SB's Form editor will appear in the Editors pane. It consists of eight panels, the first three of which are very similar to those in the OUS, but again, very little of this information is currently used. A number of panels will eventually influence the automatic scheduling of the observations, but ALMA does not yet have a mature scheduling system and so these fields are also not currently read.

Of the remaining panels, the most relevant ones are SchedBlock and Advanced Parameters. SchedBlock gives the name of the observing mode and states which observing script e.g. StandardInterferometery.py, will be used to actually run the observations. It also gives the number of executions that are allowed for this SB, which is often set to a large number as executions above this number are not allowed. Advanced Parameters is particularly relevant as a number of parameters can be defined here which will be read by the observing script e.g. to tell the script that more than one phase calibrator has been defined and both should be observed.


next up previous contents
Next: Targets Up: Observing Program Structure Previous: Observing Unit Sets   Contents
The ALMA OT Team, 2016 Aug 23