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Procedure: ShARCS Darks Calibrations

The calculation for how long dark calibrations take is inaccurate, since it does not include enough of the overhead of actually writing frames to disk. It is not necessary to take darks with the same number of coadds as the data, so darks can be more time efficient by doing, for example, ten 180s exposures with 1 coadd, rather than doing ten with 2 coadds each. Keep the total time it takes to do darks in the morning so that they are complete by 8:30 am (the time at which a day tech is likely to come in to fill dewars or start disconnecting power to take the instrument off the telescope). If dark calibrations are likely to take longer, send an e-mail to: mh-techs@ucolick.org informing of estimated time darks shall be completed so that instrumentation is not disconnected before darks are complete.

This document last updated (UTC): Tuesday 04 March 2025