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Suzaku Guest Observer Facility

Maki - XRS FOV and Multi-Mission Observing Windows


Maki is a tool designed to serve two purposes: investigating instrument Fields of View (FOV's), and viewing multi-mission observing windows.

Important Note: The current version of Maki does not work on 64-bit machines. We have a perl script that can determine the available roll angle range for a given sky position for a given date, as an alternative.

Maki allows the user to plot a detector FOV onto a FITS image, further allowing the user to investigate different roll angles. This is useful, for example, for the case of an observation of an extended target which requires a specific roll angle. Maki allows the user to see when the target is observable for the given roll angle.

While previous versions of Maki allowed users to overlay FOV's directly via Skyview, the current version does not support this functionality. Further, at this time, Maki has only been built and tested on Linux and Solaris. We are working to port Maki to other platforms. If you do not have access to Linux or Solaris machines, please drop us a note.

Installing Maki

Note added on 2006 Nov 29: There is a new version of the tarball (maki-cycle2.tar.gz) which corrects one bug in an earlier version which prevented users from specifying the year 2007 or later.

  • Download the tarball.
  • Gunzip and untar it.
  • Go to the top level directory created (cd maki) - this is the directory that $MAKI should point to at run time (see below).
  • Run the installation script. Two versions are provided, install-Linux.sh for Linux users and install-Sun.sh for Solaris users. The only difference between the two is the location of the Bourne shell.

It requires gcc version 2.95.3 or newer.

Running Maki

The user must first set an environment variable, "MAKI", to the location in which maki was built. Once this is done, type "$MAKI/bin/maki." For convenience, it is possible to add

setenv MAKI <path_to_your_maki_installation>
alias runmaki $MAKI/bin/maki

(for example) in the .cshrc; once this file is sourced, "runmaki" will start the program.

Maki requires a FITS image, which can be loaded at start-up by typing, for example, "$MAKI/bin/maki $MAKI/run/algol.fits" (the example file algol.fits may indeed be found in the $MAKI/run directory.) Alternatively, user may load an image via the "Load FILE or URL:" box in the center of the maki window.

Once an image is loaded, choose the mission/instrument, and the observing date. The Roll angle window will be highlighted in red if the target violates the mission's viewing window. Green and yellow both indicate that observation of the target is possible on the selected date. Yellow indicates the current roll angle is off-limits (i.e., outside the "Good Range"), while green indicates the roll angle is allowed.

Currently, maki has definitions of ten FOV's. This includes four for Suzaku: the HXD FOV, the XIS FOV and two FOV's for the XRS. The latter two are an outline of the FOV of the entire XRS and the FOV's for the individual pixels making up the full XRS. These FOV's reflect the latest geometry of the Suzaku detectors.

Further help can be obtained by clicking the "Help" button at the upper left-hand corner.


If you have any questions concerning Suzaku, visit the Feedback form.

This file was last modified on Wednesday, 20-Oct-2021 08:43:51 EDT

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