Archiving of Magellan Telscope Data at the CFA

The TDC now provides an archive and tape backup for all CFA and Harvard observers' Magellan raw data here at CFA, as it has done for the MMT f/5 instrument data.

Since the Internet bandwidth to the Baade and Clay telescopes is too low to do it directly, the Magellan data usually comes back on the observer's laptop or other external storage device.

We are asking observers to FTP Magellan raw instrument data to a staging area for transfer to the archive. The staging area and archive are, of course, not accessible to anyone except the TDC staff.

Archiving is the only use the TDC will make of the data.

If the data has already been transferred to a disk in the CF domain or the HEAD domain, and is world-readable (or readable by one of my groups), just email Bill Wyatt the location, and I'll copy it over. My group list on the CF domain cfyp.cfa.harvard.edu as of this date is:

  oir-www  tdcin-grp  retspec  echelle  mmti     ircam     oirsys 
  oirgroup hectogrp   megagrp  tdc      fastgrp  swircgrp  keplergrp
I am not a member of any groups (other that my own) in the HEAD domain federation, but you could request my addition to a group if you think it more useful.

In general, if it's just as convenient, please use the anonymous FTP incoming service, where anyone can upload files, but not download them. I will acknowledge the uploading of the files when I move them to their final location.

Finally, as a convenience for observers, I have made available two high-level summaries of all the data. The first is magellan_pi.db, which gives a count of files for each PI and instrument, sorted by PI name and then date. The second is magellan_date.db, which gives a count of files for each PI, but this time sorted by date and then PI.

Uploading instructions

  1. cd to your directory holding data.
  2. ftp cfa-ftp.harvard.edu
    • User :  ftp
    • PW  :  user@    <-- your name plus the "@" sign
  3. Then, at the ftp prompt, type:
           binary       <-- ensure binary mode transfers
           prompt       <-- turns file-by-file prompting off
           cd /incomingonly/Magellan/instr
    
    where  instr  is one of:
           bc   imacs   ldss  magic   mike   panic
    
  4. Assuming your data is divided into one directory per night, e.g. 2006.0524, for each directory type:
           mkdir 2006.0524
           lcd 2005.0524     <-- your local data directory
           cd 2006.0524
           mput *
    
Last Update: by Bill Wyatt