All you need to know

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For preparing successfully your observations in service mode, here you can find all sorts of manuals and tutorials you need. What you absolutely need are these three pieces of information:

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• The service mode golden rules and the general OB rules

• The Instrument User Manual and Template Manual

• How to use p2 for preparing and submitting your observations

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Manuals

Once you know the general aspects of the service mode Phase 2 and you understood if you need to ask for a waiver to break some general OB rules, it's time to get into the details of your instrument setup. There could be particular observation limitations and constraints, waivers and calibrations specific to your instrument and that you need to take into account. In addition you need to have a guide on how to fill the template entries of the OB(s) in p2 and for this you need the User and the template Manuals. To make your like easier we collected all this information in a single comprehensive table where you can find a link to all such details.

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Have a look at the ESO instrument table.

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Tutorials

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The demo p2 tutorials

If you want to get familiar with p2 and the preparation of the OB before creating the OB of your own run, we created a demo p2, with existing demo runs for each instrument. Each run contains a series of tutorial observation,s one for each instrument observing mode. Several show also how to create containers of OBs, from time-link containers to concatenated OBs. If you are dealing with the ESO Phase preparation for the first time or you are using a new instrument, we recommend to have a look at the tutorial observations. You can easily copy one or more observation in your own folder and experiment by modifying the observing constraints and the template entries. To understand how to do these simple steps you can follow our quick-start tutorial. The demo p2 can be found at http://www.eso.org/p2demo . Be aware that many users take advantage of this tool to get familiar with p2. Thus, you will find in each run not only the tutorial folder but also many user folder. We recommend to delete the folder with your experiment after you finish practicing with p2demo.

The template OBs can be also exported via the import/export function so that you can import them in your own run in the real p2 tool. This could be a good and easy starting point for preparing your observation!

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Instrument specific tutorials (p2 and other)

P2 tutorials are available for nearly all number of instruments. A link to the instrument specific tutorials can be found in the comprehensive Instrument table above. 

The Instrument table offers also a comprehensive set of FAQ that are mostly related to

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General p2 tutorials

Also available are some general general tutorials on the use of scheduling containers, on the attachment of finding charts, on filling out the README, and on finalizing the overall Phase 2 submission:

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• General view of p2

• How to prepare OBs: text version

• How to prepare GROUP scheduling containers: text version

• How to prepare CONCATENATION scheduling containers: text version

• How to prepare TIME-LINK scheduling containers: text version

• How to prepare the README file: text version

• How to interactively prepare the observations with ObsPrep: video version

• How to prepare and attach Finding Charts and Ephemeris file: text version

• How to import a list of targets: text version

• How to conclude the p2 preparation: text version

• How to trigger TOO observations: video version

• How to submit a Waiver Request: video version

• How to submit a Target Change Request: video version

• How to submit an Instrument Setup Change Request: video version

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