On March 29, the director of the IAC made the decision to close Teide Observatory to comply with the Spanish government's order to close non-essential facilities. LCO's telescopes at Teide were taken offline on that day, and power to the site was shut off on March 30. The earliest date that Teide Observatory might re-open is April 9. LCO continues to make science observations from Siding Spring Observatory (Faulkes South 2m telescope, two 1m telescopes, two 0.4m telescopes), Wise Observatory (one 1m telescope with NRES unit), and Haleakala Observatory (Faulkes North 2m telescope, two 0.4m telescopes).
LCO's pipeline development group is about to introduce a new version of BANZAI. The changes in the new version are architectural and will facilitate the development of future pipelines, like a BANZAI for processing NRES data. The changes are almost entirely invisible in the data products, with the exception of an additional extension in the FITS files. When the new BANZAI is deployed, the extensions of the FITS files will change from ['SCI', 'CAT', 'BPM'] to ['SCI', 'BPM', 'ERR', 'CAT']. The new extension, 'ERR', contains an array of uncertainties associated with each pixel in the image. The uncertainties are accumulated from each stage of the reduction process. If you are using software that accesses the bad pixel mask (BPM) or source catalog (CAT) by extension number, i.e. that relies on the current order, we recommend that you modify your code to access the extensions by name. ----- The new BANZAI version will be rolled out on Monday, April 6. Additional information will be posted on the BANZAI Pipeline webpage.
