Last Updated Jan 2001

Copyright © 2001 The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Observatory liaison includes communications concerning plate shipments.

Shipments are planned following agreed-upon priorities, requests for return of plates, and plate availability. The observatories send us electronic lists of the shipment contents, usually before the shipment is delivered. (For POSS-II shipments we immediately check this list, following the instructions in POSSII lists, to determine whether any of these plates have been here before.

Our observatory contacts inform us when the shipment leaves their site; we inform them when it arrives and also report on the condition of the plates when they are unpacked.

POSS-II plates are received from CalTech; SES plates are received from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (ROE), Scotland; GR plates come directly from the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

Because of customs regulations in Scotland, we always try to return exactly the same shipment that we received from ROE. Usually there is only one SES shipment in house at a time. There is no such constraint on POSS-II shipments. To expedite deliveries, we usually prepare a return shipment of scanned POSS-II plates as soon as is practical after we have unpacked an incoming shipment. Thus, we often have more than a single shipment of POSS-II plates in house. We plan to retain all GR plates until they are scanned and we are satisfied with the processing of the scans.

The following lists our contacts at the three observatories.

Return to OPS Documentation.