From Handicraft to Industry: Supporting Surveys at ESO Telescopes

摘要

The ESO observatory at Cerro Paranal will host two new telescopes dedicated to survey-type observations. While surveys have al-ready been conducted with existing ESO facilities, the features of the newESO Survey Telescopes are a challenge for the Observatory's users andoperations teams as well, in terms of number of observations and datarate. A set of software tools are being developed to help astronomersdefine the observation strategy and sequencing, while observatory staffare given assistance in managing and executing projects including hun-dreds or thousands of observations, and producing highly homogeneousdatasets. This paper presents the extensions to ESO's 'Phase II' toolsthat will be implemented in the context of survey support, and discussessome of the challenges faced by software developers when problem sizesscale up one or more orders of magnitude.