For 25 years, W. M. Keck Observatory has relied on observers to do their own planning for their observing nights. This would usually result in a starlist and a notion of what would be best to observe next based on the priority to the science they were conducting. Under the Data Services Initiative, this will become a required part of observing. The Database-Driven Observing Infrastructure aims to supplement the creation of science-ready data by carrying observation metadata throughout the observing process. The result is a file with all the data about the observation ready to be processed by the pipelines. In order to facilitate this, tools are being developed to help create better observing plans. One of the big complexities is that W. M. Keck Observatory currently supports ten active instruments with more on the horizon and no clear plan of retiring old instruments. With that in mind, the Database-Driven Observing Infrastructure system has been developed to be modular and instrument agnostic so that differences are abstracted from the system and handled only at the entrance and exit points of an observation. The benefit to this is that new instruments are easy to implement and old instruments are easy to update.
Since the start of science operations in 1993, the twin 10-meter W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) telescopes have continued to maximize their scientific impact and to produce transformative discoveries that keep the observing community on the frontiers of astronomical research. Upgraded capabilities and new instrumentation are provided though collaborative partnerships with Caltech, the University of California, and the University of Hawaii instrument development teams, as well as industry and other organizations. This paper summarizes the performance of recently commissioned infrastructure projects, technology upgrades, and new additions to the suite of observatory instrumentation. We also provide a status of projects currently in design or development phases and, since we keep our eye on the future, summarize projects in exploratory phases that originate from our 2022 strategic plan developed in collaboration with our science community to adapt and respond to evolving science needs.
To maintain and expand its scientific productivity and impact, the W. M. Keck Observatory is undertaking a new strategic project to redefine how the Observatory approaches the creation of science products: the Data Services Initiative (DSI). The philosophy of DSI is grounded in the principle that the future of astronomy requires that data must be usable, useful, and quick. Reaching these data goals requires significant changes to key elements of the observing process: observation preparation, observation execution and calibration association, data reduction, and data archiving.
In this presentation, we will introduce DSI and its components, and describe the science gains that are enabled by it.
The remote observing system at W. M. Keck Observatory has been in place for more than 20 years, but prior to 2020, it had focused on providing observing access only to observers physically located at a prescribed set of formal sites, typically dedicated rooms located at member universities in the Keck partnership. The Novel Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 forced a rapid and drastic change in the philosophy and design of the Keck remote observing system. These changes were made in two phases. The first phase could be characterized as triage or emergency response, while the second phase focused on longer term issues such as security, staff support, and maintainability of the system.
The W. M. Keck Observatory is welcoming a new era where data reduction and archiving are tightly integrated into our observing model, under the auspices of the Observatory’s Data Services Initiative (DSI) project. While previously the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) archived minimally processed, raw science data the day after observing, Keck is transitioning to a model in which it archives both raw frames and reduced data in near real-time. These data will be made available to observers and collaborators immediately upon ingestion through a dedicated new interface that will support collaboration and sharing among teams, as well as stream data directly to personal computers without access to Keck’s internal networks. Both the raw and science-ready data products will be made publicly available upon the expiration of data protections. The Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) instrument is the first whose data are managed this way. It showcases how KOA integrates into an observing night, provides the data needed to make real-time adjustments to observing, and delivers products that allow for faster publication by both our observers and archival researchers. This effort has involved the delivery of new, compact, Python-based data preparation and ingestion software. We also discuss the new and updated Data Reduction Pipelines (DRPs) required to generate science-ready data, how their development and deployment enables the delivery of these products, and how Keck’s commitment to maintaining DRPs in-house will result in more robust datasets for all our observers and KOA users.
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