In Effelsberg for every measurement we create a FITS file containing RAW data. These files are parsed regularly and meta data like sky position, rest frequency, observer and project ID, etc. get stored in a MySQL database.

One new tool which uses the Effelsberg database (there are more) is the Obslogger, which replaces the older "Effprotocol" program. It can not only be used to show basic information on recent measurements, but provides some basic filtering options and allows to store comments in the database. Both, operators and observers, are strongly invited to make use of this new feature.

Using a terminal/shell, you can start the Obslogger with the command

obslog # on the "observer2" computer, user: "vncuser"

For convenience, we've also added a short-cut to the Obslogger to the start menu in any of the VNC sessions.

In Fig. 1 a screen shot of the observation logger is shown. Per default Obslogger shows the last 24h of observed sources in the so-called "group-by-subscan" mode. In this mode, for every scan one row in the table view is printed. If desired, one can also let Obslogger show one row per subscan, by choosing the "Show all" option with the associated Combobox (marked with 1 in Fig. 1). Furthermore, one can easily adapt the columns which are shown by using the Button "Columns shown" (2).

One can filter the currently presented entries using the fields in the "Filter options" area (3). As an example the project ID could be used to retrieve only those measurements, which belong to the current project. Using the date choosers one can query for older data sets as well. But keep in mind, that very large time ranges will take the database server a while to return the results.

The user can send the current view (in text format) to any email address or save a file locally on disk (4).

Another very important feature is commenting. Commenting in grouped mode adds a general comment associated with the scan, whereas commenting in the "Show all subscans"-mode (Fig. 2) allows editing comments on a subscan level, associating the comment with a subscan. With a click on "edit comment" a dialog appears where the user can add/edit a comment.

Figure 1: Screen shot of pyobslog.py using "group-by-subscan" mode.

Figure 2: Screen shot of pyobslog.py using "show-all subscans" mode.