EIS Definitions and Conventions

30 August 2004

Introduction

The EIS survey system is designed to administer and document (via integration with a robotically maintained WEB service) multiple surveys and strategies in their entirety, from survey definition to release of science-grade products by nominally operating in unsupervised mode. Achieving this requires the introduction of well-defined procedures to enable adaptive, automatic and sequential addressing of information. Occasionaly, these may be need to be properly explained, which will be done in this document when necessary.

In addition, the system also produces a large variety of survey products requiring clarification on the different data types, FITS header keywords and conventions.

The purpose of this document is to serve as a quick reference document for users of data products produced by the EIS survey system. This is a ``live'' document which will evolve time as required.

Pointing Nomenclature

For some surveys involving external collaborators, inconsistencies may be present between adopted conventions which, while inconvenient, are unavoidable. Below some of these differences are described and their origin explained.

Ideally, the standard adopted by EIS to name a field is to use the survey name and/or region as the root, followed by a numerical suffix generated by the particular algorithm used in the construction of the "Observation Block" (OB) and the associated survey strategy (as defined by a set of pointings, instrument and passband). Typically, this numerical suffix is assigned in an increasing sequence based on the R.A. and Dec. defining the pointings. This should be done when a survey is first defined. In this way, all possible identifiers of a field utilized by the EIS system (both internally and externally, e.g. OB name, object name, target name, field name) and their graphical representations on the EIS WEB pages form a homogeneous set.

Historically, however, the conventions have evolved in time due to several factors:

Hence, in practice, the desired ideal case is not always attainable and requires some retroactive adaptations. The following noteworthy discrepancies between these different conventions are:

Glossary

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EIS Definitions and Conventions

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