Friday, March 12, 2010

A couple of UKIRT updates

It looks like UKIRT (which is where my work is) will go to a minimalist operation mode at least until March 2012. For us in the instrument and telescope software group that will mean some interesting new work as we have to make everything capable of being operated remotely. We have been able to operate (and even power cycle) some things remotely for a long time, and now there will be more of them, and different ones. There's bound to be a bit of fun (software engineering kind of fun) in that - and some time pressure. As JCMT are still in the process of shared risk observing (on sky science commissioning with visiting observers) of their amazing new instrument SCUBA2, we're going to be busy.

Another new thing from UKIRT is a new data release of the WFCAM UKIDSS galactic plane survey. You can look at the whole thing or details here - if I'm honest, I could look around that thing for days. (I hope I'm allowed to make this public, but it's on a website that's public. And, advance warning, there a heck of a lot of data in it)

No comments: