Useful Stuff

• Stop taking data If you wish to abort the current procedure, just click ``Interrupt'' on the Spectral Line Observer's Widget. Note that this option doesn't appear until after you have started observing, and the data taking will not stop until after the current integration is complete.

• Moving Data You can move the data anytime the correlator is not busy simply by hitting the ``Move Data'' button in the AO Spectral Line Observer's Widget. You should be aware that you create a new data file every time you move your data. This can be very inconvenient for analyzing data in, e.g. Analyz. Also, until you re-point whichever monitoring program you are using, this will also result in the monitoring program looking at the old file.

• Configure AO-Control

  If you have been trying out AO-Control while reading these pages, you will have noticed by now that it likes to ask the user for confirmation before it issues a number of commands to the data-taking program. For example, rotating the turret, pointing the telescope to a source in the catalog all require this by default. While this helps to trap occasional gaffs made by first-time users to the system, more experienced users will find these constant confirmation requests rather irritating since it may result in far too many mouse clicks being required from the user -- this is almost as bad as too much typing!

  
  Screen shot showing the user preferences widget, with the "sound" option turned off.

  To minimize the number of confirmation requests, and switch off the little one-line hints at the bottom of the main window, a configuration widget can be invoked by clicking on the ``User Preferences'' button in the AO-control window. Fig. 11 shows the layout of this widget and its default settings. Expert users can disable all help and confirmation requests by simply hitting ``Expert Settings''.

  You can also turn off the sounds with this gui.

• Send E-mail

  The AO-Control main window provides two buttons for sending E-mail at any time during the observing run.

  
  Screen shot showing a sample mail reporting RFI.

  The ``RFI Report'' button invokes a mail compose window in which you can type your gripes about radio frequency interference directly to the RFI group at Arecibo. If you are seeing interference, it is very important that you report it. If you do not report the RFI you see, we cannot do anything about it!! And the better you can characterize the RFI (center frequency, rate of occurrence, polarization, strength, line width, etc) the more readily the folks at Arecibo will be able to track it down.

  Similarly, the ``GUI Comment'' button allows you to send mail to those people at Arecibo affiliated with the GUI, concerning any aspect of the GUI (bugs, strange features, suggestions, etc). Both these mail options should prove useful, particularly at 3 a.m. when the comments are fresh in your mind.