Name conventions

This article documents the conventions for file names and directories on the computer (a12) used in the astronomical laboratory courses.

The user praktikum (German for laboratory course) is the user name for all participants of the laboratory courses at the laboratory computer. The access possibilities for students are described in the article Access to the laboratory computer.

In the Home directory the subdirectories for the semesters can be found, named following this scheme ssXX or wsXX-XX, where XX are the last two characters of the year(s), i.e.

ss12 or ws12-13

Within the account praktikum all participants of the laboratory courses have full writing rights. To avoid chaos, each group should create and use their own directory, preferably in the name scheme groupX, where X is the group number. Within that directory best create subdirectories for the different experiments. Note, N2 has its own naming scheme! The directory system should look like:

praktikum's home directory
--ss11
----group1
----group2
------s1s2-sun
------n1-spectra
------n2-stellar_clusters
----group3

Old semester directories are kept in the directory cleanup.

The root directory has further subdirectories:

• data contains all observational data
• scripts contains scripts and programs that are needed for the laboratory courses.

Do NOT modify the scripts or the data in these directories, but copy all necessary files to your group directory.

In the data directory you will find further subdirectories that are named within the scheme YYYYMMDD, e.g.

20120815

The data in this directory are then exposures of August 15, 2012.

Copy your observational data to your group directory to make the data reduction there. The files in the data directory serve as backup of the observations, i.e. to restore the raw data in case errors occur within the scope of the data reduction.

The directory can contain special labels, attached to the name of the directory. The label must be separated by an underscore _, e.g.

• _einsteinturm
• _groupX

The data for the observations S1 and S2 are taken at the Einsteintum, so the directory could be named YYYYMMDD_einsteinturm. In case more than one group observed during a night, their respective data are stored in directories YYYYMMDD_groupX, where X is their group number. Special cases may have their own labels, which should be self-explanatory.

The scripts directory contains subdirectories, named after the id of the observations and should look like:

praktikum's home directory
--scripts
----s1s2
----n1
----n2 

Copy the scripts to your group directory to customize them as needed there.

All further directories are irrelevant for the laboratory courses.

Overview: Laboratory Courses