English

ESO's Exposure Time Calculator 2.0

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2020-12-21 v1

Abstract

Users of the La Silla Paranal Observatory have to rely on the ESO Exposure Time Calculator (ETC) to prepare their observations. A project has been started at ESO to modernise the ETC, based on a python backend and an angular-based front-end. The ETC 2.0 will have a programmatic interface to enable the results to be included in an automated quality control loop and to communicate with the Phase 1 proposal preparation and the Phase 2 observation preparation tools, the ESO science archive, as well as with scripts runs by external users or instruments. The first version of an ETC 2.0 has been released for the 4MOST instrument and further versions will be released over the next years for all new La Silla, VLT and ELT instruments. The ETC of the current La Silla and VLT instruments will also be migrated progressively, with improved instrument description.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.09860,
  title  = {ESO's Exposure Time Calculator 2.0},
  author = {Henri M. J. Boffin and Jakob Vinther and Lars K. Lundin and Gurvan Bazin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.09860},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Author version of a paper presented at SPIE

R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:03:37.305Z