... Operations of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) require the creation of stable and efficient observation schedules in an environment where inputs to the plan can change daily. ... A process and software architecture is presented which achieves stable and efficient observation schedules by dividing the task into long term and short term components. ... However, the resulting long range plan would be unstable as unscheduled observations in a week bin would have to be rescheduled. ...

... For queued observations, the nightly scheduling will be performed by sta# astronomers using an Operational Toolkit. ... The toolkit will make all observation preparation data available to the oper­ ator, and will allow the definition of queues and timelines of Observation Blocks (OBs). ... The operations team then uses the Operational Toolkit to browse the repos­ itory and build queues, based on object visibility, expected observing conditions, and user­defined scheduling constraints. ...

IRAF/STECF 2-D spectrum point source / background decomposition package . ... The general problem is one of spectral decomposition - of separating the spectra of the point sources from the background. ... The STECF IRAF layered package "specres" provides two tasks to extract point source spectra from 2-D images (either longslit, multislit or cross-dispersed) and decompose the full background over the image. ... A Point Source Function spectrum image is required as a 2-D spectrum. ...