HSpot is a huge and increasingly complex piece of code (more than 170 000 lines of Java code) that has seen constant increases in functionality and that has involved now around 30 Man-Years of development. It has gone through extensive testing on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. We believe that all of the major and many of the minor bugs that are under our control have been located in these campaigns although sometimes new issues can appear unexpectedly due to an apparently innocent change in the code to correct a quite unrelated problem. With Herschel in operations constant, small updates have been made in the light of the in-flight performance of instruments (e.g. sensitivities and HIFI band widths) there have been numerous changes, some major, as AOTs have been tested and refined in space and better ways have been found of taking data than those initially envisaged on the ground and new, second generation observing modes have been developed. Most observing modes are now quite stable, but further changes are possible with more detailed characterisation based on a larger quantity of in-flight calibration.

Where we are aware of a significant problem that has not yet been fixed or issue that the user should be aware of, it is listed below. Please note though that not all issues that are reported are under our direct control as HSpot also uses some external facilities and also some problems refer to parts of the code that are Spot Core and thus not maintained at the Herschel Science Centre.

As Herschel moved over to operations and HSpot is being used by astronomers in increasingly complex ways, particularly by the instrument specialists who are planning and carrying out observations on board who have been modifying and adapting, sometimes extensively, the way that observations are carried out, it is natural that the number of issues reported started to increase again. Please note though that, in most cases, the average user will not even be aware of these problems and their impact on normal HSpot use will be small, if any. The typical problem that is reported is a minor irritation to the average user and something that can be worked around, even if he or she is even aware of it, rather than representing a serious issue for the astronomical community.

The problems are divided into HSpot issues and proposal handling issues. Within each, they are sub-divided into sections for ease of search.