Outlook on ODI Operations

The One Degree Imager was conceived as a general facility instrument with open access for the WIY and NOAO communities. The original - and funded - plan is to operate ODI in visitor mode and to provide data reduction support for the essential instrument signature removal only through an instrument pipeline. With the complexity and data volume of ODI, this baseline scenario might not utilize ODI's potential in the best way.

WIYN is therefore exploring the possibilities to offer additional services to the community:

• Data reduction pipeline and archiving:
  We acknowledge that the data volume of 0.5TB to 4TB per night and the complexity of the raw data might be overwhelming for some observers. WIYN is therefore evaluating options for automated data handling and processing. The ODI instrument will have a low-level built-in data pipeline, but the scientific calibration with archival calibration products might not result in the best possible data reduction. A WIYN-supported data reduction system would guarantee consistent calibration results and timely analysis. Options for long-term archiving are also being explored to increase the legacy value of the ODI data.
• Operation in queue mode:
  A queue observing scheme, with observations actually performed by highly trained WIYN staff, would guarantee successful observations for highly-ranked proposals, take advantage of the best seeing conditions at WIYN, and allow for flexible time allocation of programs that would not be viable under visitor mode. Queue mode also simplifies acquisition of the calibrations and consequently of the data reduction pipeline. As a first step towards an ODI queue, we plan to provide the ability to describe observation runs outside the observatory environement.