Gathering headers in a distributed environment
Bret D. Goodrich, Steve Wampler, John P. Hubbard · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) has implemented a novel method for gathering header information on data products. At the time of data collection, the specific state of the telescope and instrumentation needs to be collected and associated with the saved data. The ATST performs this task by issuing a header request event across the ATST event system. All observatory software components that are registered for the event and are participating in the current experiment or observation report status information to a central header repository. Various types of header request events may be selected for start or stop of individual frames, groups of frames, or entire observations. The final data products are created by combining the data files with all or some of stored header information in the database. The resulting data file may be generated in any possible format, including FITS. Much of the implementation of this approach is integrated into the ATST technical framework, simplifying the development process for component writers and ensuring consistent responses to header request events.