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Running the Code

To start a new iteration of the tiling, taking into account the galaxies which have already been observed during the survey, follow the steps under Running the Tiling. This will create the necessary .fld files for the targets in each of the Hector Regions (G12, G15, etc).

If you want to tile a new region of the sky, go to Adding a new region

Running the Tiling

  1. Create a new config file named YYYMMDD.yaml in the config folder. This should contain a single entry which is the date you're conducting the tiling. This is used to make the output folder in results. The format for this line should be date: YYYYMMDD.
  2. Ensure that the most up-to-date versions of the Master Region catalogues are in the resources/MasterRegionCatalogues folder. These are the files which contain all the Hector targets in a given region (including galaxies which have been observed already). Note that we need three catalogues to tile a region of sky- a galaxy catalogue, a guide star catalogue and a standard star catalogue.
  3. Ensure that the up-to-date Hector Observing Database is sym-linked in the resources/HectorDB/hector.db. The script workflow/scripts/remove_observed_galaxies.py uses the galaxies_observed table to see which targets from the Master Region catalogue have already been targeted. Anything in this table will have its value of N_observations_to_complete reduced by 1. Anything with N_observations_to_complete equal to 0 will be ignored by the Tiling code.
  4. Now run snakemake -npr --configfile config/YYYMMDD.yaml, giving it the name of the config file you made earlier. This will print out the steps the pipeline will undertake. Note that this command will tile all of the different regions Hector will observe. I highly recommend that you always retile all of the regions together. It is possible to only make new tiles for, say, H01 on its own. However you'd then need to remember that the most recent tiles for H01 were in a different folder than all of the others and it would be easy to make a mistake when preparing for a run~
  5. If all that looks acceptable, run snakemake --configfile config/YYYMMDD.yaml to actually run the code.
  6. You should end up with a new folder in results/YYYMMDD. This should contain two folders: MasterRegionCatalogues and Tiling. The MasterRegionCatalogues folder contains all of the targets for a given region with all the targets we've already completed removed. This is the catalogue which has actually been tiled by the code. The Tiling folder contains the .fld files which you'll need for the Observing Pipeline, as well as plots of each of the tiles the code has made.

Adding a new Region

To add a new region to the tiling, you'll have to make adjustments in three places:

  1. Add the required galaxy, standard star and guide star catalogues to the correct subdirectory in the resources/MasterRegionCatalogues/ folder.
  2. Add a line to the resources/RegionInformation/all_regions.csv file. Each row sets out a square patch of sky to define the area each "region" covers.
  3. Add the name of the new region to line 21 of workflow/Snakefile. This line sets out which regions the code will run on.

And that should be it!