Last Update: Wednesday, 05-Mar-2008 13:09:53 EST by Bill Wyatt

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Archiving of Magellan Telscope Data at CFA

The TDC now provides a private archive and tape backup for all CFA & Harvard observers' Magellan raw data here at CFA, as it has done for the MMT f/5 instrument data.

Since the Internet bandwidth to the Baade and Clay telescopes is too low to send a night's data directly, it usually comes back on the observer's laptop or other external storage device.

We are asking observers to FTP Magellan raw instrument data to a staging area for transfer to the archive. The staging area and archive are, of course, not accessible to anyone except the TDC staff.

Archiving is the only use the TDC will make of the data. In other words, this archive is NOT PUBLIC. It is a backup service and implies nothing about your making data public.

If the data has already been transferred to a disk in the CF domain or the HEAD domain, and is world-readable (or readable by one of my groups), just email me (wyatt@cfa) the location, and I'll copy it over.

Otherwise, if it's just as convenient, please use the anonymous FTP incoming service, where anyone can upload files, but not download them. I will acknowledge the uploading of the files when I move them to their final location.

Since the Magellan FITS headers do not include PI names, please include that in your email to me, especially if some of the files have been observed for someone else. I will add the PI keyword and name to the header before archiving the data.

Finally, as a convenience for observers, I have made available three high-level summaries of all the data, sorted in three different ways.

• summary_DATE.db            = count of files for each date, sorted by instrument and PI.
• summary_PI.db                  = count of files for each PI, sorted by date and instrument.
• summary_INSTRUME.db    = count of files for each date per instrument, sorted by PI & date.

Uploading instructions

1. cd to your directory holding data.
2. ftp cfa-ftp.harvard.edu
   • User :  ftp
   • PW  :  user@    <-- your name plus the "@" sign
3. Then, at the ftp prompt, type:

          binary       <-- ensure binary mode transfers
          prompt       <-- turns file-by-file prompting off
          cd /incomingonly/Magellan/instr
   

   where   instr   is one of:

          bc   imacs   ircam   ldss  magic   mike   panic
   

4. Assuming your data is divided into one directory per night, e.g. 2006.0524, for each directory type:

          mkdir 2006.0524
          lcd 2005.0524     <-- your local data directory
          cd 2006.0524
          mput *