Jupyter notebooks of LBT observing planning tools.

Jupyter notebook to identify candidate blind offset reference stars for a target. Uses the Gaia catalog to provide high-precision star positions including proper motion corrections.

Jupyter notebook to make target visibility plots for the LBT on a giving observing night, including nightly circumstances (sunset/rise, moonrise/set, twilight, etc.).

Jupyter notebook to compute atmospheric differential refraction (ADR) effects for MODS targets. Plots the ADR effect given a particular slit, position angle, and range of hour angles. Helps to visualize the importance of ADR for a given target to plan for orienting the slit along the parallactic angle at mid-exposure.

EXPERIMENTAL observing planning tool for MODS that uses the Gaia catalog to identify likely guide stars and blind offset stars for a target.

Current state is a "sandbox" for working out the steps needed for a possible way to select guide stars when setting the optimal slit position angle on the fly.

Source: https://www.astropy.org/

Most of these notebooks reply on modules from the astropy project:

• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.units
• astropy.time
• astropy.visualization

Source: https://github.com/jrthorstensen/thorsky

Visibility planning tools use John Thorstensen's thorsky package. thorsky is built on astropy.coordinates, astropy.time, and astropy.units and comprises of two classes, thorskyclasses3 and thorskyutil, the latter of which uses faster but sufficiently accurate versions of analgous functions from astropy.coordinates that are high-precision but slow (LST, moon and sun positions, and barycentric calculations). We don't need high precision f or this type of calculation.

Other dependences are dateutils and pytz which come with the Anaconda distro so should be transparent.

Note: it needs astropy 5.2 or later as a bug in 5.1 kills this package at initialization.

See the thorsky documentation if you need to dig deeper, change the observatory site, etc.

Source: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

MODS field visualization and blind offset star calculation uses astroquery.gaia and the Gaia TAP+ database. Our code is based in part on the Gaia Archive tutorial that uses the Gaia TAP+ (http://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gaia/gaia.html#module-astroquery.gaia)