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Hubble Space Telescope
What's New for Cycle 18 Phase I

For Cycle 18, we have implemented the following changes to APT for preparing Proposals:

  1. Hubble Legacy Archive - The HLA footprint service has been added to the Aladin tool in APT. Select File>Open in Aladin and then choose the HLA from the left hand column of Image Servers. See the HLA in Aladin documentation or training movie for details.
  2. Increased Scheduling Flexibility - If you find your observation is unschedulable due to critical scheduling constraints, there is now an option in Phase I which will increase the schedulability of your observations at the cost of orbital visibility. See the Orbital Viewing and Schedulability web page for details.
  3. Beta Phase II Mosaic tool - There is a beta capability for building mosaics in Phase II proposals that you may want to try. It allows you more control than the Phase I Mosaic tool. (If you are working on a mosaic larger than 16 tiles, save and restart APT if you have to change the size of the mosaic.) See the demonstration movie for more information.
  4. Larger Memory Option - For all platforms except Windows, APT now offers a larger Java memory footprint option. If you have more than 2 GB of memory this will allow you to use more of your available memory for APT (the new largest memory option is twice as much as the old largest memory option).
  5. Differencing Tool - Although it is not a new capability, most people were unaware of the tool in APT which can highlight differences between two proposals (or portions of one proposal). There is now a training movie about the Differencing Tool available.
  6. Context Sensitive Menus - APT now has context sensitive editing menus in the Tree Editor. For instance you can right click on a target to find options like "New Fixed Target" and "Delete" (instead of looking for these options in the menus or remembering the shortcuts/hotkeys).
  7. Native Mac Save & Load File Dialog - Mac users will now notice that when saving and loading files in APT, the native Mac save & load file dialog box is used instead of the generic java dialog box.