Andy Adamson
Operations Corner
Operations at Gemini have been very productive over the last six months.
In this wide-ranging review, we report on a significant improvement in the
installation process for Gemini IRAF users, large amounts of engineering work
done in mid-year, and instrumentation developments at both our northern
and southern facilities.
The UREKA Unified Release
The process of installing all of the software our average user might need to have a workable
IRAF/Python environment has always been difficult. The idea of Ureka (also known as the “unified release”) is to bundle all of 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 in June, Ureka has been
downloaded by hundreds of users, and feedback is being used to bring it to production
release status. Even at Beta, however, it is for many users already fully functional and does
not require administrative privileges to install. If you would like to try Ureka out, go here:
http://ssb.stsci.edu/ureka/. Your feedback will be gratefully received as we improve it further.
Gemini South Shutdown
The Gemini South winter shutdown was completed successfully, with a wide variety of work
carried out. One of the biggest jobs was a complete reworking of the summit data center,
which included replacing old obsolete racks with new ones. To achieve this, we had to install
the computer systems themselves in temporary racks while the old ones were swapped out.
We also did maintenance and improvement work on the telescope infrastructure including
the Acquisition & Guiding Unit (A&G) and the Cassegrain Rotator), as well as on GMOS-S
October2013
GeminiFocus 14