Scan date vs observation date: midnight issue

When a new scan is prepared⁴ at the telescope, the associated IMB-FITS file name is constructed with the current date. Later in this process (up to several minutes after), the scan is actually started⁵, and the current date and time are used to build the MJD-OBS and DATE-OBS in the FITS Primary header. If those two steps are performed exactly before and after midnight respectively, the file name and the Primary header refer to 2 different dates, e.g.

iram30m-fts-20120809s323-imb.fits:
  MJD-OBS =     56149.0038078704 / MJD at observation start
  DATE-OBS= '2012-08-10T00:05:29.000'

For several purposes, Mrtcal saves the observing date and time of each file in the index. In order to deal correctly with the above issue, it is decided to:

1. save the date as found in the file name, so that there is no difference for the user between the file name and the date exposed by MRTCAL,
2. the time value saved for this file refers to the above date.

The direct consequence of those 2 rules is that, in case of the midnight issue exposed above, the UT value will be larger then 24h. Note that the UT value associated to each file is saved for bookkeeping purpose, e.g. for analysis of the calibration though date and time. It is considered as a typical value for the whole scan. Each individual spectrum produced by MRTCAL uses its own date and time.

In details, the observing date saved in the index is used:

• to check the entry uniqueness (date, scan and backend triplet should be unique),
• to sort the entries (by date, scan and backend),
• through the command MFIND /DATE,
• in the output of the command MLIST,
• in the Sic variables MDX%DOBS and MHEAD%KEY%DOBS

and the associated UT value is used:

• to sort the entries,
• in the output of the command MLIST,
• in the Sic variables MDX%UT and MHEAD%KEY%UT

The user should be ready to encounter UT values larger than 24h in the MLIST output and larger than $2 \pi$ in the Sic variables.