WINTER watchdog: always look at the past 2 nights. #413
Conversation
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FYI WINTER alerts are not sent manually to IPAC each day. They are sent to IPAC as the final step in our automated DRP, similar to ZTF, but our processing time for a given night can vary substantially and we currently process the entire night sequentially rather than image-by-image. The upshot is that if we observe a lot of the galactic plane, processing can last beyond the cutoff time for Kowalski. |
Oh cool! I remembered that this was not fully automated earlier on, is that correct? |
Or rather, that you guys had to wait before running the fully automated pipeline |
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It starts at a fixed time every day, rather than processing data in real time. We do also have the option to push candidates in manually via the API, maybe that's the source of confusion? But that only gets used if we need to reprocess data, it's a few times a year that it gets used. |
For winter since the topics are expressed in local time we already did UTC date - 1 to get the topic we want to look at.
Another issue is that at 0 UTC is when we move to new topics (when we also restart the machine every day btw), so if the WINTER alerts (that are processed and sent to IPAC manually every day, after the night of observation) are sent at or after that time, upon reboot we already are listening to the next topic and won't read the data from the previous night.
So in this PR, we just make the
obsdateparameter a list (obsdates), which defaults to not just UTC -1, but UTC -1 AND UTC -2.We could consider looking back a third day just to be safe, might want to just make that configurable at some point.