This manual contains a description of the recommended
observing strategy to perform polarimetric imaging with ISOCAM (C05).
A general overview of ISOCAM, a description of the instrument, its
performance and sensitivity limits is given in the ISOCAM Observer's Manual.
Furthermore, flying ISOCAM has broadened and deepened our knowledge
of its performance. All this new information has been put into a
single place, the Addendum of the ISOCAM Observer's Manual.
We address in this document only the problem on how to set-up
observations for C05 measurements. We assume that the reader is
already familiar with ISOCAM's concepts. If this is not the case, one
should obtain and read first a copy of the original ISOCAM Observer's
Manual and the Addendum.
This document is structured as follows: Chapter 2 outlines the observing strategy, which is to perform a raster. Chapter 3 discuss how observations should be set-up to cope with the most limiting factor of any C05 measurements: the detector drifts and flux transients. The other very limiting factor of ISOCAM observations is the importance to avoid saturation, its impacts on C05 measurements is given in Chapter 4. The calibration time of the observatory is limited, which results in a reduced number of fully calibrated optical configurations. The optical configurations calibrated in ISO calibration / engineering time by using observing time of the ISOCAM Instrument Team is discussed in Chapter 5. The sensitivity limits in terms of RMS of the in-space measured degree of polarization of a non-polarized target is given in Chapter 6. Observtions are performed by using an observation template file, which is described in Chapter 7. The steps on how to submit your observations template files to the observatory are specified in Chapter 8 and a summary is given in Chapter 9 . An example of a typical observation template file, the so called `polar.dat' file is given in the Appendix.