Dark energy survey operations: years 4 and 5
The Dark Energy Survey is a “stage III” dark energy experiment, performing an optical imaging survey to measure cos-mological equation of state parameters using four independent methods. The scope and complexity of the survey, originallyscheduled for 525 nights of observing spread over five years and combining a 5000 degree wide survey with a 10 field weeklytime-domain survey, introduced complex strategic and tactical scheduling problems that needed to be addressed. We beginwith an overview of the process used to develop DES strategy and tactics, from the inception of the project, to task forces thatstudied and developed strategy changes over the course of the survey, to the nightly pre-observing meeting in which imme-diate tactical issues were addressed. We then summarize the strategic choices made for each sub-survey, including metrics,scheduling considerations, choice of time domain fields and their sequences of exposures, and wide survey footprint andpointing layout choices. We go on to describe the detailed process that determined which specific exposures were taken atwhich specific times. We give a chronology of the strategic and tactical peculiarities of each year of observing, including theproposal and execution of a sixth year. We give an overview ofobstac, the implementation of the DES scheduler used to sim-ulate and evaluate strategic and tactical options, and automate exposure scheduling; and describe developments inobstacfor use after DES. Appendices describe further details of data quality evaluation,τ, andteff; airmass calculation; and model-ing of the seeing and sky brightness. The significant corpus of DES data indicates that the simple scaling relations for seeingas a function of wavelength and airmass derived from the Kolmogorov turbulence model work adequately for exposureplanning purposes: deviations from these relations are modest in comparison with short time-scale seeing variations