ing the loss of a complete night to the passage of Tropical Storm Flossie.
The science included measuring the diameters of nearby stars, Kepler exoplanet confirmations, and observations of Pluto and
Charon — a wide range of exciting science observations for a niche capability. It is expected
that the instrument will be offered again for
2014B; its capabilities and performance are
summarized here: http://www.gemini.edu/
sciops/instruments/dssi-speckle-camera-north
In November, DSSI was succeeded onto
Gemini North by TEXES, a mid-IR high-resolution spectrometer making its third visit to
the telescope (the last having been before
2010). The winter weather was not very helpful, but the TEXES team still obtained useful
observations on a mini-queue of programs
granted by the Time Allocation Committee,
with a total of 90 hours.
DSSI and TEXES were oversubscribed by factors of two and three, respectively.
User Software Improvements
The UREKA Unified Release
In june, we released a new a new mechanism for installing and running the Gemini
reduction package and all of its supporting
software. The idea of Ureka (also known as
the “unified release”) is to bundle all the required pieces and release them together in
one easily-installed package. Ureka has the
added bonus of not interfering with any existing installations.
A quote from the Ureka page sums up what
it’s about: “Ureka is a collection of useful astronomy software that is generally centered
around Python and IRAF. The software provides everything you need to run the data
reduction packages provided by the Space
Telescope Science Institute and Gemini.”
Since its Beta release to the community,
46
Ureka has been downloaded by hundreds of
users, and feedback is being used to bring it
to production release status.
Observatory Control Software
Improvements
Work has been going on “under the hood” of
the other operations software to enable significant future improvements, and to make
the software more maintainable. Overall,
the OCS (Observatory Control Software) has
been reduced in size by about 1/3, due to
the removal of internal communications layer. Users will not see much change, though
the changes also required the implementation of “Sync” to replace the old “Fetch/Store”
mechanism, which should be simpler for PIs
to use, and prevent data loss. This change
was included in the December 2013 software release.
Users’ Data Reduction Forum Added
We are pleased to announce the release of
the Gemini Data Reduction User Forum, located at: http://drforum.gemini.edu/. This is
intended as a user-supported site for the
trading of ideas, scripts, and best practices,
and for taking part in user-driven public discussions on data reduction processes and
strategies. If you have written a script, procedure, tip, or description of your own process
that you think other Gemini users may find
helpful in reducing their data sets, please
consider posting it here.
The Forum’s “start here” page (http://drforum.
gemini.edu/start-here/) gives a brief introduction and some points to note when posting or
taking part in discussions. Both the Observatory and the Users’ Committee for Gemini are
keen to see this Forum well utilized and become helpful to a broad segment of our user
community. To encourage your involvement,
Gemini Director Markus Kissler-Patig has
agreed to award Director’s Discretionary ob-
GeminiFocus 2013 Year in Review
January2014