Introduction

This document gives a description of the ASTRO software, developed to help astronomers to prepare their observations with the IRAM telescopes. ASTRO stands for ``A Software To pRepare Observations''.

ASTRO includes a series of tools to compute ephemeris, typically the position of sources as seen at a given time from a given location. These commands are described in Chapter . Although they are slighlty biased towards (sub)millimeter astronomy, specially in the terminology used for input and output parameters, these commands are generic enough to be used to plan observations with any instrument.

A number of tools are available to prepare millimeter-wave observations (Chapter ). Especially, ASTRO provides an interface to the ATM library, that can be used to model the atmospheric absorption and emission at millimeter wavelengths.

ASTRO also includes a number of tools that are specific to the IRAM instruments, and are aimed at helping astronomers to prepare observing procedures for the Pico Veleta 30m antenna and the Plateau de Bure interferometer. Theres tools are descrived in Chapters  and .