Occulters in/out flats.

[bberkeyU]

Perform periodic checks of the flats with occulters in and out.

[bberkeyU]

@detoma has asked that we run an occulter in test after the waves program.

Should this test do occulter and occulter out at the same time? Or can we satisfy any of our in/out comparison needs by getting the occulter out flats from our normal synoptic program?

Program to take occulter out flats is linked here:
measure-occulter.cbk

[detoma]

It depends how much the occulter moves.

It would be better to flat-field all data with the flats without occulter for consistency.

[bberkeyU]

In the past, we mainly took occulter in flats to look for differences in structure between the occulter in and out. The two versions were taken as close in time as possible to accomplish this. We are running this test for a different reason (to measure the occulter diameter), so I didnt include normal flats in the program. And I was trying to point out that if someone wanted to compare backgrounds, they would need to look for an occulter out flat much earlier or a bit later in the day.

I am not suggesting that the pipeline ever looks at the occulter in data (unless we find something compelling in the analysis); I think the occulter in flats will always be engineering datasets.