Last Updated Jan 2001

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

We are notified via e-mail when a new plate shipment is prepared at the observatory. This notification usually contains an electronic shipping list. After the shipment has been received and unpacked, these files are used to enter the plate shipment into the Plate Data Base via ENTERPLATE.

SES shipments from ROE have a single electronic list file. ROE also sends us an electronic list file in the same format for the GR shipments sent directly from the AAO. The original e-mail messages should be extracted as SHIPMENTnnn.MES files (where nnn = shipment number, i.e. 001, 002, etc) into DISK$USER:[GSOPS.PLATELISTS] subdirectories [.SES] and [.GRE]. The electronic list files are then extracted from these .MES files as SHIPMENT.nnn files. Unless discrepancies are found in unpacking the actual plate shipment, no further manipulation of ROE files is necessary before running ENTERPLATE.

The shipping lists for POSS-II plates are received in two files: the .FNL file is a list of plate labels and plate ids (a duplicate of the shipping list sent with the plates), while the .LOG file contains the rest of the plate info (position, filter, etc). Again, the original e-mail messages are stored as SHIPMENTnnn.MES files in DISK$USER:[GSOPS.PLATELISTS.POSSII]. The two list files are extracted as SHIPMENTnnn.FNL and SHIPMENTnnn.LOG FILES.

One should QA POSSII shipping lists immediately when the files are received. After the plates are unpacked and before ENTERPLATE is run, any discrepancies must be corrected and the files sorted by field.

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