fuse_sat (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fuse_sat) wrote,@ 2004-03-30 10:16:00 |
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Wow, what a day.
The plan was for me to spend all day yesterday looking at a variable star in its quiescent state, with an expected count rate of 46 counts per second. That's a pretty easy task for me to manage, and it looked like I was going to have a nice easy day while the guys on the ground cleaned all the weekend data off my solid state recorder.
Wrong!
I knew I was in for a long day when the star came into view. That was no dim little 46 cps star. It was in outburst, and the count rate stayed above 2000 counts per second for most of the day yesterday. Appreciate that the observation was being done in time-tag mode, where I have to record each count with its arrival time, and you'll see that during each visibility period I was busy slapping time stamps onto millions of counts. I slammed the time-tag buffer up to its maximum size, and that helped, but I still overflowed the virtual recorder a couple of times between ground contacts. If the observation had been done in histogram mode it would have been a lot easier, but hey, I deliver what's asked for.
Whew... thankfully that's over now. Still clearing out the buffers and the recorder, but that should be done in a few more orbits.
The plan was for me to spend all day yesterday looking at a variable star in its quiescent state, with an expected count rate of 46 counts per second. That's a pretty easy task for me to manage, and it looked like I was going to have a nice easy day while the guys on the ground cleaned all the weekend data off my solid state recorder.
Wrong!
I knew I was in for a long day when the star came into view. That was no dim little 46 cps star. It was in outburst, and the count rate stayed above 2000 counts per second for most of the day yesterday. Appreciate that the observation was being done in time-tag mode, where I have to record each count with its arrival time, and you'll see that during each visibility period I was busy slapping time stamps onto millions of counts. I slammed the time-tag buffer up to its maximum size, and that helped, but I still overflowed the virtual recorder a couple of times between ground contacts. If the observation had been done in histogram mode it would have been a lot easier, but hey, I deliver what's asked for.
Whew... thankfully that's over now. Still clearing out the buffers and the recorder, but that should be done in a few more orbits.
