After a break.....

Things have not been so smooth for the last two months. Partly, the reason is because I had to go out to India to attend a job interview. So the story goes likes this. An opportunity at Cochin University of Science and technology came up and to make things worse, this required me to appear for a screening test. The interview call letter said that they will select the top 20 applicants from the screening test and interview the top 20. So, I decided to be brave enough to face the screening test. Prepared the most fundamental stuff for one week and travelled to India. Appeared for the test and I got through ....Hooray... There was one round of interview and there will be a final round of interview with an expert panel. I do not have the dates for the final interview, but will have to travel again to India soon to appear for the final interview.
While in India also, I had to work on several eBOSS related issues. May be I will just make use of this blog to briefly list whatever I did in the past few months (Not necessarily in the chronological order).

• Tiled eboss23. These are ELG-NGC plates. Completed the hour angle assignments. A total of 87 plates. Submitted as two batches. These will be plateruns 2016.11.a.eboss abd 2016.11.b.eboss. This two plateruns should take care of the eBOSS plate requirements untill next year.

• Updated the scale factor for the ELG plates. Initially, we were overcooking the ELG plates with 1.5 times. An optimal SN2 of 10 will take the red shift efficiency above 70 percent (Anand's analysis). for the first 20 plates or so we set the plate depth at SN2 of 15. Now, we are keeping at an SN2 of 8 (updated analysis). Tagged a new idlspec2d v5_10_3.
• Updated the WAVEMID values for the R2 camera. These were out of the bounds for a couple of nights.
• Had to retire batches of eboss plates couple of times to make room for the oncoming ELG plates.
• Updated the survey-mode keyword for ELG plates in the platedb. Reverted back the status of ELG plates from "Special" to "Accepted". Conor made some changes in petunia so that the survey mode will be painted over the plate observing window. This will help the observers to identify the ELG plates and start the special guider actor.
• Attended the eBOSS-DESI joint collaboration meeting at OSU,columbis. I presented a talk on the current eBOSS survey status. Here are some plots from my talk.
  1. Plot of completed plates vs the projection. We were doing good till the last summer shutdown. A bad weather run in this year is disappointing. Hope to catch up soon with some good weather.
  
  2. A plot of at what rate are we acquiring data. The plot depicts the number of scheduled hours vs on-sky hours as a function of MJD.
  
  3. A plot of comparison of seeing at APO during BOSS and eBOSS. The seeing has worsened by 1 arcsec during eBOSS.
  
  4. Comparison of footprint in DR13 and DR14.
  
  5. eBOSS projection for year 5.