1. Useful Websites

• CDS home page at RAL
• CDS Request Diary
• Tips/rules for planners
• CDS Newsletter
• Current solar 'weather'

2. Active Regions & Flares

CDS is not a flare hunting mission. Flares can cause detector degradation and their observation involves careful operational planning. As with all requests to use CDS, any applications to observe flares will be processed in the normal way, and safeguards introduced as appropriate.

An active region may be observed using CDS regardless of the flare probabilities given by NOAA. If the planned Study is with the NIS, the GIS should be at a parked voltage. If a flare is seen, the NIMCP Study (see above) should be run as soon afterwards as is possible, pointed to a quiet sun area. In any case WIDE SLIT (90"x240") STUDIES ON ACTIVE REGIONS ARE NOT PERMITTED!!!

When performing flare studies where there is a good potential for seeing a flare, it is best if the rastering is not done over a small area. This is to avoid just sitting on a flare, without moving off it.

Probabilities for individual ARs and other activity information are given on the NOAA Web pages linked to the CDS forecast1.html Web page - see item (1) above.

If an active region Study is to be run, and it is not aimed at the study of flares, it is best to avoid active regions with very high chances of large (M or X) class flares.

3. Contact Addresses for Other Instruments

4. Special Targets

If there is a special opportunity due to the appearance of a particular solar feature which you feel demands a change to the plan, please contact Andrzej or/and Peter. Such opportunities are likely to interfere with the plan below, and thus disrupt other people's requests. Changes of this kind must be discussed first.

5. PLEASE AVOID STUDY TRUNCATIONS!

Please insert the Studies into mk_plan carefully. There are uncertainties in durations and time-tagged studies will truncate on-going Studies. See the 5% Rule item in the Tips for Planners Web site.

Don't use a time-tagged study to abort an on-going Study.

6. Study Details

To examine the details of a study, use XSTUDY in idl.

7. Weekends

To ease weekend staffing requirements it is necessary to load a 3-day plan on Fridays. Don't make them too elaborate! Keep weekends basic! That means that pointing for weekend JOPs must be fixed on Friday. If in doubt, speak to Andrzej or Ron.

8. Emergency Stop

The planning software is set up to append an emergency study which can kick in if the deferred command store runs out of entries - i.e. loss of commanding. See the Tips and Rules for Planners website for details.

9. Pointing in Image_Tool

Please verify that the EIT image used for target selection has (0,0) at Sun centre. If the image is offset, use 'fit limb' to correct that.

10. Telemetry SubModes

See details on Submode changes in the Tips and Rules for Planners website.

11. Feature Tracking

See Tips and Rules for Planners website for details.