Science Operations

Data Flow

At the telescope, LUCI, like all facility instruments at LBTO, writes all new images directly to the /newdata partition. This is mounted (read-only) on all of the observer workstations. The archive software detects these new FITS images and copies the data to /Repository/ as well as to Tucson for further distribution. The /Repository directory is also mounted (read-only) on all observer computers on the mountain (obsN) as well as in RemoteOps (rm507-N) in Tucson. The /newdata directory gets cleaned of previous nights’ data at noon each day, while /Repository directory preserves access to uncompressed FITS images from the recent past (up to ~6 months).

If you are running an RTD, it also downloads a local copy of the FITS data and stores it in ~/.luci/readoutN, where N is 1 or 2 corresponding to LUCI1 or LUCI2. You can take the data from here, but it is not an official copy and may be deleted randomly to save space. We recommend you use /newdata for the current night and /Repository for earlier nights in your observing run.