Re: Here's what Adam said about the 20-degree earth avoidance angle: (fwd)

From: Rachel A. Gibbons (ragibbons@lbl.gov)
Date: Tue Jul 13 2004 - 11:20:38 PDT

  • Next message: Rachel A. Gibbons: "Re: NICMOS use of more relaxed earth-avoidance angle."

        The first two visits with ACS (imaging and grism) have been finalized.
    We are always at BEA>25D for these observations. The loss in exposure
    time isn't bad. The NICMOS orbits I've put in won't be affected by any of
    this because the visibility is better later in the week - which goeas
    along with better BEA.

        We also got the roll angle to something decent for the grism
    observations.

        I'm very pleased with what we put in.

        Rob and I need to sleep now. Well, actually, I need to find a place
    to live first.

    Rachel

    On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Saul Perlmutter wrote:

    > I asked Adam about the possibility of breaking up the orbit into enough
    > separate exposures that you could isolate the bad background light
    > exposures, but apparently they find that the exposures are often enough
    > made from (unpredictable) parts of several different orbits that this is
    > hard to do.
    >
    > I think the NICMOS idea should work, however, as Vitaliy suggests.
    >
    >
    >
    > Greg Aldering wrote:
    >
    > >This problem is the result of having to look over the earth to see this
    > >field this time of year. Certainly we should consider restricting the
    > >grism observations to > 25 degree from the earth. For z-band the damage
    > >may not be bad, as we will (or could) break an orbit into several
    > >exposures, and readout noise might be dominating the noise (I suppose
    > >Rachel can answer this easily enough). (We could consider making the
    > >exposure times unequal to better isolate the bright parts.) As for NICMOS,
    > >I don't really know whether the problem of the earth's limb is all that
    > >bad as I expect less scattering at red wavelengths, and if we are
    > >processing the up-to-ramp data we could just deweight the bright times
    > >(Vitaliy, is that possible?).
    > >
    > >- Greg
    > >
    > >
    > >On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Saul Perlmutter wrote:
    > >
    > >
    > >
    > >>Here's what Adam said about the 25-degree earth avoidance angle:
    > >>
    > >>Apparently, it was the ACS and GOODS teams that started switching to
    > >>25-degree avoidance (from the previous default of 20 degrees). They
    > >>found that there was no way they could separate out the high-background
    > >>part of the orbits from the dark parts of the orbits (especially since
    > >>orbits are sometimes stitched together to get the exposure time
    > >>requested), and that the hit in noise with a 20-degree avoidance angle
    > >>was dominating over the gain in exposure time with a 25-degree avoidance
    > >>angle. So Adam said that the GOODS team and Adam's SN team always use
    > >>the 25-degree angle now.
    > >>
    > >>This sounds like we should switch to this too. Comments?
    > >>
    > >>
    > >>
    > >>
    > >>
    > >
    > >
    > >
    >

    -- 
    ------------------------------
    Dr. R. A. Gibbons
    Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
    1 Cyclotron Rd MS 50R5032
    Berkeley, CA 94720-8160
    USA
    Tel 510.486.7416
    ------------------------------
    


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