General Guidelines

Projects do not appear in the OPT directly after the disposition letters are sent. They are created about a month before the first allocated array configuration and a readiness email is sent.  After you receive the readiness email, you may begin working on creating the observing schedule. However, before you begin working on creating your observing schedule, we recommend the following:

• Collect proposal information to remind yourself the details of your science goals.
• It is good to have your proposal handy; it should be available in the PST if you do not have a printed copy already.
• Double check the project, in the OPT labeled with the project code, in terms of PB(s) entered by NRAO staff. This read-only information will be the project name, allocated time, array configuration(s), and scheduling priorities.
• Source catalogs will be created with the PST information provided.  However, make sure that the source positions are transferred correctly and to sufficient accuracy for your science.
• Resource catalogs will be created, but will be empty. 
• Determine if you will be using an NRAO default resource or if you will need to create your own resource, e.g., spectral line or custom continuum. For spectral line observations you need either an exact sky frequency or a combination of rest frequency, velocity, and velocity reference frame information on your target sources, and the details of the correlator configuration.
• Collect post-proposal information (the disposition letter) and check the comments from the TAC and the technical review.
• The TAC and the technical review may have given you advice on technical limitations on current developments and perhaps determined a fixed observing date and/or limited your requested observing time. A good resource on current information about the VLA is the Observational Status Summary (OSS). The Guide to Observing with the VLA is a good companion to this OPT manual in order to create and complete efficient SBs. Other VLA documentation might help with general questions. If you need help, ask the NRAO Science Helpdesk.

Experience has shown that it is convenient to keep the RCT and SCT catalogs or groups as compact as possible since you will be selecting from these catalogs in the OPT. That is, it is best to keep only the sources and resources you want to use in a single observation in a catalog. What is meant by this and why will become clear later on.

It is also possible to create source, resources, and scheduling blocks as text files and then import these files into the various representative tools. There is more information on how to perform this procedure later in this manual.