Journal software is available to aid with book-keeping of observation files.3 If you are reducing your data at the Joint Astronomy Centre you may need to read Appendix D to find where the data are stored.
sculog will give a summary of all NDF files in a directory (the directory is the current working directory and, if set, the directory specified by the datadir environment variable (§7)).
In most cases sculog provides far too much information and a one line summary is more desirable. obssum4 is provided for this purpose:
In this example a summary listing has been requested for observations 92 through 98 from the $datadir directory (there were no demodulated data files in my current directory). The ‘–demod’ flag indicated that I am only interested in raw demodulated data (i.e. files containing ‘_dem_’ in their names). sculog (and obssum) supports many more options and these are detailed in §0.
Alternatively, listings of certain observations can be obtained by using the more specialized listing programs photsum, mapsum, pointsum and skysum. pointsum lists pointing observations, photsum lists photometry observations (and, in fact, skydip observations), mapsum lists map observations and skysum lists skydip observations. Using photsum instead of sculog on the data used above gives:
In this case I specify the range of observations on the command line and the format of the listing has changed from that returned by sculog. Note that the signal and signal-to-noise are now provided5 – this is only the case if RO files are catalogued since the demodulated data files do not contain results (the column is left blank if no reduced data is found).
On the other hand, mapsum gives this output:
pointsum can be used to list pointing data:
Note that UAZ and UEL indicate the offsets before the pointing observation and that the time is now quoted as LST instead of HST since this is the format expected by change_pointing.
In all cases the output can be stored in a file using standard unix redirection so long as the search path
is fully specified (either with the ‘-all’ flag or with ‘–begin=’ and ‘–end=’) so that the programs are not
waiting for input. e.g.:
3only available if ndfperl is installed on your system (see Appendix K)
4obssum is simply an alias for sculog summary.
5Note that HDS creates temporary files when mapping the reduced data. If the files are in a directory in which you do not
have write permission, this operation will fail and photsum will return an error message. This can be overcome by forcing
HDS to write temporary files to another directory by setting the hds_scratch environment variable to a writeable directory
(e.g. % setenv HDS_SCRATCH /tmp)