--> The Slit Positioning Algorithm | Gemini Observatory

Change page style: 

The Slit Positioning Algorithm

Field of View

The algorithm sorts and discards the objects as follows:

  • The algorithm will drop objects listed in the catalog that are not in the field of view - regardless of their priority. The field of view is rectangular in shape, with the corners cut off; similar to the shape of the FITS image.
  • It will then determine if any of the acquisition objects overlap and, working from left to right, discard those that do overlap.
  • The position of the slit is shifted according to the value of slitpos_x and slitpos_y for each object. If the object is too close to the edge such that (in length or width) the slit falls even partially outside the field of view, then that object will also be discarded.

Acquisition objects

Before submitting the mask, you must ensure that at least two acquisition objects are present in the mask, and that these are away from the GMOS CCD gaps if designing a GMOS mask.

Priority and position sorting of priority 1,2 and 3 objects

Once all possible acquisition objects are placed on the mask the slit placement then attempts to place as many priority 1 objects as possible on the mask, then as many priority 2 objects and finally priority 3. An object of higher priority will always be placed on a mask at the expense of any number of lower-priority objects. For example if placing a priority 1 object would prevent 10 priority 2 objects from being placed, the priority 1 object would be placed nonetheless... similarly for priority 2 objects at priority 3 object's expense (The algorithm does not in fact even take conflicts with lower-priority objects into account when determining which objects it will place on the mask).

The slit placement algorithm also ensures that there is at least a 2-pixel separation between object spectra once they are placed on the mask... this value is taken into account when determining which slits are mutually exclusive (meaning that they cannot both exist on the same mask) prior to slit selection.

Internal workings of the slit selection algorithm

This section describes in further detail the inner workings of the slit selection algorithm as it is on 05/24/2010, this is provided for informative purposes only and is not necessary knowledge for user operation of the GMMPS software.

While the majority of the GMMPS Plugin is written in the TCL language, the slit selection algorithm, for efficiency reasons, is written in C++. This C++ file is called from a TCL source file named gmmps_spoc.tcl with arguments that include, among other things: the name of a temporary specially formatted catalog file containing information from the OT file we are building the mask from, the pixel scale of the objects in that file, the name of the field-of-view definition file for the given instrument type, and the instrument type itself. The program output is the calculated Object Definition File(s) (ODF(s)) containing the parameters for the slits that have been placed on the mask(s).

The first thing the slit selection algorithm does is loop through the input file parsing out information in the relevant catalog columns and stores that information in an array of 'Slit' objects (the Slit object is defined in the same C++ file). A check is then made to make sure no objects fall outside of the field of view, if an object that is outside of the field of view is found it is dropped from the slit array and therefor removed from consideration in placement. If the program is in Band Shuffle mode an object is also dropped if it is not within a valid band.

In the next step a 'conflict graph' is constructed for all objects in the 'Slits' array. A conflict graph is a representation of all the slits on the mask, with the vectors representing each respective object and edges between any two vectors that cannot both be placed upon the same mask. This first conflict map is made so that when a slit is placed the program will know which slits it can remove (and therefor remove from consideration for placement) from the main Slits array, this will be useful in some of the following steps when we are considering slits of the same priority only (but nonetheless cannot place overlapping slits from different priorities).

After this the acquisition slits are placed on the mask-representation. This step is similar to the following step for slits with priorities 1, 2, and 3, with the exception that these slits will be placed on ALL masks being created in this session (if more than one mask is being created). First a conflict graph is made for between all acquisition objects, the objects are then ranked by degree of the object's graph representation (the number of edges connected to the vertex in the conflict graph) in the conflict graph that was based on objects of the same-priority. Objects are then placed on the graph starting with the lowest-degree object and proceeding until no more objects can be placed on the graph. When an object is placed any other object that conflicted with that object is removed from the Slits array, as well as the local (same priority level) and global (all priority levels) conflict graphs—the local conflict graph is updated during this step to reflect the removal of these objects. When the local conflict graph is empty then no more objects can be placed on the graph, and the program moves on to the next-lower priority level and repeats this process.

After all possible slits have been placed on the mask using this process the program determines if it is in Max_Mode. If it is not is mask mode it does nothing and move on to the final ODF-creation steps. If Max_Mode IS enabled then the algorithm sorts all slits by the non-dispersion direction (the x-direction for F2 and the y-direction for GMOS) and expands each slit as much as possible in that direction without causing spectra to overlap (and leaving a small space between each spectra for data reduction purposes). The modified slit representations are stored in the Slit definitions and the algorithm proceeds to the final ODF creation steps.

 

Last update March 24, 2013; Mischa Schirmer
In original form February 10, 2003; Dione Scheltus

Gemini Observatory Participants