Weather Handling

The way in which ACP and Scheduler work together to manage weather unsafe events (and subsequent observatory restarts) can be a bit confusing. Hopefully this info will help you understand. It's actually pretty simple. Keep in mind that Scheduler gets its weather safe/unsafe signal from ACP, not from the weather monitor itself.

Weather Becomes Unsafe

Let's say the Startup Script has run at the beginning of the evening and the system is clicking along observing...

1. The weather goes unsafe
2. ACP sees the weather is unsafe and kills any currently running observation. There may not be anything running.
3. ACP then runs its weather safety script ACP-Weather.js (or .vbs). This is responsible for "safeing" the observatory. Usually this is simply closing the dome or roof and assuring that the mount tracking is off. Since the weather may become safe later, the instruments are left powered up.
4. Meanwhile Scheduler sees the failure of the Observation it was running (if any) and if congured, requeues the Observation to run again when the weather becomes safe. Otherwise it markes it failed for weather unsafe interrupt.
5. Scheduler then sits idle showing Sleeping (unsafe weather).

Weather Becomes Safe

1. ACP waits for the weather to become safe, then remain safe uninterrupted for 10 minutes.
2. ACP then tells Scheduler that the weather is safe.
3. Scheduler runs the Startup Script, and in this case it normally has nothing to do as the observatory was left powered up with all of the software running. However, just in case something was put into an idle or power-down mode for the weather unsafe event, this script is run anyway.
4. Scheduler then opens the dome or roof.
5. Scheduler resumes dispatching work to ACP.

End of the Night

If the weather went unsafe during the night and remained unsafe for the remainder of the night, Scheduler may be able to do some things at the end of the night anyway.

• If ACP is configured for panel/screen flats, and Dawn Flats are enabled, then dawn panel flats are run since they are done with the dome or roof closed anyway.
• If dawn cal frames (darks/biases) are enabled, then these frames are acquired since they are done with the dome or roof closed anyway.