RTS2 Wiki

We are thinking on modifying the objective functions in rts2 in order to optimize the scheduler for our particular scientific purposes. This will require adding some extra information to each target, which should be easily accessible to the main merit function routines.

In particular, our database is composed of nearby galaxies. Each target (galaxy) should contain the following information:

- Physical quantities, e.g. mass, star fomation, metallicity, etc…

- Observational quantities: the time of the last observation

The physical quantities are simply analogous to the other quantities already present, like the coordinates in the sky.

For the observational quantities we have the added difficulty of requiring the time of the last observation to be updated within a given plan, to avoid looking at the same galaxy many times during the night. This is, if a given galaxy is observed at the beginning of the night, any additional observation should take this into account. (Can this be fixed by setting Ticket.obs_num = 1?)

Moreover, the time of the last observation needs to be updated every night, which makes the problem more complicated.

Hence, our questions are:

1) What is the procedure to add new information to each target? We imagine that using Postgres will be necessary, what are the particular commands that would help us?

2) Where does rts2 talk to postgres? Where can we add new parameters to each target?

3) How can we modify the database from rts2, so that after observing a target its new time of last observation would be updated?

Additionally, we would like to fix the exposure times for all the targets. What is the easiest way of doing this in rts2?