The Scan Process

When you hit "Start Scan" in the scan setup window, it will take a few moments until the control program prepares and starts the scan. A window will pop up which shows you the scan progress and also lets you cancel the running scan (see Fig. 7.3). After clicking the "Cancel" button, it might take a few moments for the scan to actually abort.

Figure 7.3: The Scan Progress window

While the scan is running, you can still control most of the display options in SM_GUI, and you can open or close the shutter, but many features are disabled (e.g., all the menus).

When the scan is done, or when it was canceled, a window will pop up (see Fig. 7.4). You can enter your name, a sample description and up to two comments and save the scan - or discard it. Note that the file will be saved in the data directory on the microscope control server computer, you don't have any other choice. You could save a copy through File $\rightarrow$ Save As at a location of your choice, but that's not necessary. You'll get your data files from the xray1 website later (see Chap. 8).

Figure 7.4: The window to save a scan

If you don't save the scan first, but later decide you want to, you can do so by File $\rightarrow$ Save File on Server, or by clicking the reddish save symbol in the tool bar.

After saving, you can still make three kinds of changes which can be written to the data file if you save it on the server again:

• Changing the display minimum, maximum (e.g., by clicking the "Full Scale" button), the gamma value or the signal which is displayed (by setting the two dropdown lists in the signal area). These only affect how the file is displayed right after opening ("by default").

• Changing the scientist, sample and comment strings in the scan parameters window (see Fig. 5.9).

• Changing the pointlist entries (see Sec. 5.14.6).