A total of 22 nights of service observing were made, which corresponds to 17% of all time available to the Nordic community. The service nights consisted of 13 more or less isolated observing nights spread throughout the semester, and a period of 12 consecutive nights (including 3 nights officially assigned as technical nights) in August. The observations performed in service mode were limited to imaging observations with NOTCam and StanCam.
The main additional task beyond performing the specific observations in service mode, was mostly administration. This includes communicating with the PIs to obtain proper instructions for the observations they needed, keeping track off which observations were done when, and under what conditions, and distributing the data and details of the observations to the PIs. This is especially important in the case were various programmes are executed at the same time, as was the case during the 12 night observing run in August.
For service observing to be useful and efficient we need to be sure that the observations provide useful data to the PIs. An important part of this is to provide a way (for the PI) to define the requirements of the observations, and (for us) to make sure that observations meet the goals of the proposed programmes.
For this we have set-up a system of Observing Blocks (OBs) which define the requirements for a set of observations. Software was developed to aid in defining OBs and the corresponding observing scripts, and schedule the observations in flexible queue mode.
Although the execution of the service observations was largely successful, the service nights were hit by relatively many technical problems (see Table 1) and unseasonal bad weather. However, a lot of experience was gained with the system to define and schedule the observations which will be useful in the future. In principle this system can now be used on a regular basis for imaging observations with NOTCam or StanCam, but further development of this system to include more complicated observations, e.g., spectroscopic or polarimetry, will require a significant amount of work and it seems better to await the new sequencer system described in below.