How to Take the Data Home

Most of the time, you don't. Data is transferred automatically to the NOIRLab Astro Data Archive so you can download the data from there. All raw DECam data is processed by a Community Pipeline managed by NOIRLab, which delivers reduced images (single and stacked) with astrometric and rough photometric solutions (see more detail in the NOIRLab Data Handbook). You will be contacted by e-mail by NOIRLab when your reduced data is ready for downloading. The process may take a few weeks after your observations are finished.

Observers may also plug a USB storage device (disks, flash drives, etc) to observer2 to copy all or part of their data. Be sure the storage device is formatted as FAT32 or VFAT. If you want to transfer only a few images to your laptop, using scp is a a valid option.

Plugging external devices is ONLY allowed in observer2.

A log file for the nights of your observation can be generated by using the command invPrint [n] in Kentools.