There are two main tools available to the community that are relevant for planning MOONS observations. Both of these are currently hosted on the MOONS wiki, which is used by the MOONS science team. Understandably this requires a password to access, but if you are not part of the MOONS science team and would like to use some of the tools, please get in touch and we will see what we can do. The best people to contact are, Michele Cirasuolo (mciras@eso.org), Oscar Gonzalez (oscar.gonzalez@stfc.ac.uk), and William Taylor (william.taylor@stfc.ac.uk).

  1. Exposure Time Calculator
    This can be used to accurately predict the required exposure times to reach certain S/N for a typical target. It is very similar to the traditional ESO ETCs, allowing the user to choose the instrument setup, observing conditions and to choose from a range of different typical spectral templates.
  2. MoonLight
    This is the software used to prepare observations, that assigns fibers to astronomical targets. Clearly this is a preliminary release of the software, as it is still undergoing lots of development. The fiber positioners of MOONS natural impose restrictions on what objects can be simultaneously observed – e.g. the MOONS fibre positioners are distributed at fixed locations across the field, so you can’t observe a compact cluster efficiently with the instrument. MoonLight lets you load in your catalogues of objects and get a feel for what sort of allocation efficiencies can realistically be achieved.