Write astroplan tutorial

[adrn]

We should show off the new features in a demonstration of how to prepare for an observing run. Rough sketch:

• Read in target list from text file with astropy.io.ascii
• Query catalogs to find nearby standard stars
• Plot visibility curves (airmass curves) for each object

If we want to go crazy, we could even optimize over slew time and "time-til-transit" to auto-generate a queue...

[kelle]

I'd love to work on this at AAS Hack Day. (And the multiple model thing which was bounced around last week.)

• what kinds of standard stars and which catalogs? Options which I can think of include A0 stars, flux standards, and guide stars.
• what's the package for the visibility curves?

I would vote for not going too crazy since everybody optimizes their target list in slightly different ways.

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Adrian Price-Whelan < [email protected]> wrote:

We should show off the new features in a demonstration of how to prepare for an observing run. Rough sketch:

• Read in target list from text file with astropy.io.ascii
• Query catalogs to find nearby standard stars
• Plot visibility curves (airmass curves) for each object

If we want to go crazy, we could even optimize over slew time and "time-til-transit" to auto-generate a queue...

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/astropy/astropy-tutorials/issues/73.

Kelle Cruz, PhD — http://kellecruz.com/ 917.725.1334 — Hunter: x16486 — AMNH: x3404

[cdeil]

FYI: in a few months we'll have an Astropy-affiliated package for this, there's two GSoC 2015 students working on this and others are interested: https://astroplan.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Of course, if someone wants to write this tutorial now they should go ahead! We can re-work it to use astroplan for certain things later.

[emilylurice]

To keep the scope of this tutorial reasonably limited, I could imagine several tutorials becoming combined into a Guide on (Ground-based?) Observing, in general: writing target lists, making finder charts, finding standard stars, other calibrations, calculating exposure times, creating airmass plots, etc.

[kelle]

Here are the existing ones in the astroplan repo: Observing the Summer Triangle Plotting with Astroplan Defining Observing Constraints Scheduling an Observing Run

[kelle]

This has come back up as part of Chapter 1 in the BOB project in #400