How to understand ready, but idle scopes

donheff

I am curious how to understand what I see on the monitor. I put a request in on the Namibia Takahashi recently and I can see the telescope is busily imaging. I would guess my job is towards the end of the queue and could take a while to work its way up. I also put up a wide field request for Orion on the Samyang hoping to make a nice image of the broader environment. That device has a much shorter queue but seems to be ignoring it. Last night it sat idle all night and just now, it shows as ready but idle. I think M42 is high enough in the sky now to be imaging so why no action? Is there a way to understand what is going on when telescopes show ready buy idle?

lukas_demetz

Hi @donheff ,
thank you for your message. Well, sometimes the answer might be "it depends" 🙂

On a basic level, the scheduler on every observatory orders the requests according to their age, i.e. the older have precedence on the newer. However, this sorting is done after having evaluated all constraints of all currently scheduled requests.
So, some are excluded due to moon distance. Some are excluded due to being (still) too low. And whatever remains is sorted and the first is taken for imaging.

Now, in the last couple of days another two issues are ruining the party: First (and foremost) the weather, as the rainy season is approaching we are basically stopped due to bad weather. Also, three days ago we had a power outage which stoppe dthe H8 and Samyang completely in the late evening.

Also, the Samyang is still a bit of a mistery to get it going correctly. It hit once again the roof, and I do have to assess any issues that caused. But foremost we are now implementing a safety switch to avoid such contact in the future 🙂

Will keep you posted 🙂

Lukas

donheff

Thanks Lukas. Is there a simple way for users to understand what is up with an observatory? I kept looking at Samyang and it appears to be happily up and ready to accept jobs but apparently wasn't. Weather would show on the console as clear. Then I noticed a little caption indicating that the last successful ping was three days ago. To me, that would indicate the system being pinged was down or somehow malfunctioning. Why have the console show ready and idle in that case?

Color me confused about how to judge whether a queued request is likely to get processed in a day or two or maybe not for weeks. I am guessing from your message above that I should cancel my current Namibia jobs and try at another location?

lukas_demetz

Well, there are a few indications about the status of an observatory. Weather status, for example, even if it says "clear" but the ping is older it would mean that the scope was under clear skies when the last ping came in.

I agree that sometimes it's not as easy as it should be. I am trying to improve it, however it turns out to not be exactly simple to package all situational awareness in one easy to understand user interface 🙂

Currently, Namibia is "complicated" weather wise, so it might make sense to move the requests on one of the other scopes 🙂

danieldh206

I think it is the curse of Orion that caused Samyang to hit the roof. Because of the Orion curse it doesn't matter if I am trying to image Orion with my own gear or remotely, something will go wrong. I am only joking but Orion always causes problem for me.