User's Guide to the Hamilton Spectrograph


Table of Contents


Introduction
Quick Reference
Hardware
CCD Characteristics
Apertures
Grating Tilt & Dewar Height
Filter Wheel & Shutter
Calibration Sources
Photon Integrator
Image Rotator
Iodine Cell & Slit Room Controller
Guide Camera & Filter Wheel
Software
Data Taking System
Hamilton Motor Controller
Showmidpoint
Eventsounds
Hamilton Focus
More Info:
Spectral Format
Navigating the Spectrum
Table of Orders
Setup Procedures
Checklists
Observing Hints
Throughput

Data Archive
Mt. Hamilton Homepage

Eventsounds

Eventsounds is a program to generate sounds for exposure events, such as Exposure Begin and Readout End. This software is not required for operating the Hamilton Spectrograph, but is very helpful for indicating when an exposure has begun or finished reading out.

Eventsounds may be run on gouda, karnak, or shard for Shane telescope observers or catpc for CAT observers.

To start the software on gouda, karnak, or shard type
eventsounds hamilton &
On catpc type
eventsounds -a hamilton &

If eventsounds is run on a computer other than gouda or by a remote Hamilton observer, a separate program called soundplay must also be run on the computer whose speakers you wish to use. Remote observers will have soundplay started on their local machine (if it has speakers) automatically when they start the remote observing VNC viewers.

There are four exposure events for which sounds can be generated, Erase Begin, Exposure Begin, Readout Begin, and Readout End. The checkbox to the left of each exposure event determines whether the sound is played or not (a red checkbox means the sound is played).

A large selection of sounds are available from the pulldown menus. You may test play a sound by right clicking on the sound event name (e.g. ReadoutBegin).

The Volume slider at the bottom of the window adjusts the master volume of the sound played.

A particular configuration of sounds may be saved for future use by clicking on File - Save... and saving to a file of your choosing (please save the file to your subdirectory in /u/user/observers/). This file may be loaded by clicking File - Load....

Under the Edit menu is the option Show Timestamp. This will add a timestamp entry to the GUI to show when a sound was last triggered. This is useful for diagnosing problems.


Support Astronomers (sa@ucolick.org)
Last modified: Thu Mar 4 12:36:58 PST 2010