Flexible Scheduling and the OMP

Abstract

By the late 1990s there was an increasing desire around the world to maximise telescope productivity by moving towards flexible, also called “queue”, scheduling. The objective was to reduce the weather lottery of rigidly scheduled nights and to take advantage of specific, but rare, conditions such as good seeing or high transparency at thermal infrared wavelengths. Such schemes were at the heart of the operational models for some of the 8 m telescopes that would soon enter service. However, with the greatly improved image quality now available at UKIRT and the requirement for dry conditions for some observing modes of the Michelle imager-spectrograph, flexible scheduling also offered UKIRT potentially enormous gains. However, although moving to flexible scheduling had been debated for a number of years at conferences and over cups of coffee on cloudy nights, it would be a huge psychological leap for a generation of astronomers used to “owning” specific nights on a telescope. So, to investigate how the protocols, observing tools and human issues of flexible scheduling might work in practice, UKIRT carried out a flexible scheduling experiment in the second half of 1999.