Preface

Telescope Operators

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT INFORMATION: The Parkes Radio Telescope does NOT employ telescope operators. At least two observers who have been trained to operate the telescope will therefore be required to be at the observatory for most observing runs of long duration.

First-time Parkes observers should make every effort to plan their arrival to allow between three and five hours to complete the obligatory SAFETY INDUCTION ( 2 hours) and TELESCOPE OPERATOR ( 1-2 hours) training during normal Observatory working hours (8:00 am to 4:30 pm Monday to Friday) before their observing run begins.

Prior to your arrival, you should at least skim through Planning Your Observations, Observer Training & Safety and the Occupational Health and Safety manual (PDF file).

Conventions

Computer system names and program names appear in a different typeface, e.g. PAVO is the name of one of the Parkes observing control computers and TCS is the name of the main Parkes observing program.

Command examples and filenames appear in a fixed-width typeface and separated from the normal flow of text. To indicate the context, the commands are shown with the program’s command prompt or the operating system’s prompt. For example:

pavo-100% tcs

is the command used to start up TCS. It may seem obvious, but you should not type the text of the prompt when entering commands.

Optional command parameters appear [in square brackets]. Do not type these brackets when entering commands.

Another example - when running the ls command from the operating system shell, to list the files in a directory:

$ ls

The ‘$’ is the operating system prompt, and the command is ‘ls’.

Linux/UNIX is case-sensitive, so operating system commands must be typed in the correct case (usually lower case).

This document was generated by Stacy Mader on October 13, 2011 using texi2html 1.82.