A crucial component of the Elixir system is the program 'status', which is used for visualization of data from a variety of sources. Status is essentially a sophisticated data analysis package, which is specifically tuned to work with the database files available in Elixir. Status is based on the Opihi shell which is also used by 'Mana'. It has the same user interface, and shares many commands with Mana, particularly those related to vector display and manipulation. In addition, status includes display concepts relevant to astronomical coordinates. It can easily display data in sky coordinates using a variety of projections.
Status is aware of the data in the various Elixir databases, such as the image registration database, the photometry database, and so forth. Status can be used to extract subsets of data from the various databases and display them as needed. For example, it is trivial to plot the location of all observed images, or all stars with a given magnitude range, etc. There are a variety of ways of getting at the data in the database, allowing for a high level of flexibility. There are low-level commands to extract a given set of measurements from the database into a vector (for example, all magnitudes or all ra coordinates). There are also high level commands which perform fairly complex operations on the database (for example, plot the color-magnitude diagram using a defined set of selection criteria). The built-in complex commands are a quick way to perform a complex task, while the low-level commands can be used with the opihi programming language to generate complex representations of the data not available with the high-level commands.
Status can be used in both an interactive and a non-interactive mode. The non-interactive mode is used to run the user display tools available to the observer when the Elixir system is running.
In addition to accessing the databases, Status can be used to communicate with the 'elixir' analysis programs. These programs run in the background, and have no direct user interface. Through 'status', a user can display a variety of statistics related to the data being processes (ie, how many jobs have been performed, what machines are active, how much time was user per machine per job, etc). For more details, see the 'elixir' documentation.
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