[Last Change: 22 Feb 2012 (rev 11)]

Setting up your environment to raytrace Chandra with SAOTrace

Prior to raytracing you must:

In the following shell code,

«INSTALLDIR»	is the name of the directory into which SAOTrace was installed
«SAOTRACE_DB»	is the name of the directory into which the Chandra mirror configuration data was installed
«CONFIGDB»	is the name of a Chandra Optics Configuration (e.g. orbit-200809-01f-a)

Initialize the run-time environment

In order to find and run the SAOTrace programs you will need to initialize your environment.

• If you use a C-shell style shell (csh, tcsh)

  source «INSTALLDIR»/bin/saotrace_setup.csh
  setenv SAOTRACE_DB «SAOTRACE_DB»

• If you use a POSIX/Bourne style shell ( bash, dash )

  source «INSTALLDIR»/bin/saotrace_setup.sh
  export SAOTRACE_DB=«SAOTRACE_DB»

For example, if you installed SAOTrace into /usr/local/saotrace and the configuration data were installed into /usr/local/saotrace-db:

source /usr/local/saotrace/bin/saotrace_setup.sh
export SAOTRACE_DB=/usr/local/saotrace-db

Specify default trace-nest parameter values

Chandra raytraces are performed with the SAOTrace trace-nest command, which uses an IRAF style parameter interface (also used by CIAO and FTOOLS).

To properly access the Chandra configuration data and to generate rays compatible with MARX and the CIAO psf_project_ray command you must set default parameters for trace-nest after having initialized the SAOTrace runtime environment.

Use the pset tool,

pset trace-nest shells=all z=10079.774 output=default output_fmt=fits-axaf \
  output_coord=hrma output_fields=min focus=no tally=0 throttle=-1 \
  clean=all debug= \
  config_dir='${SAOTRACE_DB}/ts_config' \
  config_db=«CONFIGDB»