General Help

The SAO Exposure Time Calculator allows to estimate the results for the following instruments:

The current version only implements the GMACS instrument, Binospec and Hectospec will follow early 2024.

Steps

Configuring an observation consists of 3 steps:

  1. Enter the information for the source you want to observe, such as magnitude, redshift, point source of extended etc.) and select the instrument you want to observe with
  2. Enter the instrument configuration and observation parameters (grids, central wavelength, seeing etc.) the plot the result for this observation
  3. Change source or observation parameters at your will and re-plot the results

Steps 1 and 2 allows, to test how the result would look like for the different instruments and to look at the results in parallel by opening the instrument configuration in different tabs and eventually drag them inot a new window.

Step 3 allows to vary parameters, to download the configuration and data tables for the plots. Any downloaded configuration can be edited and later uploaded on the home-page.

What we store and what we do not store

First and foremost: SAO-ETC is a free service in does not require registration. Thus no personal information is stored anywhere.

However, in order to do create the results we do store the source and observation information in a local database. This creates a source and observation ID which is part of navigating between the different pages. We do not regard this information as "secret" and identify them by integers others could guess and thus look at your results if they have any interest in doing so. If you want to prevent this, download the configuration if you want to keep it for later use, then press the "Clean up" button on the plot page. This will delete the database entries.