Development of telescope control system for the 50cm telescope of UC Observatory Santa Martina

Tzu-Chiang Shen; Ruben Soto; Johnny Reveco; Leonardo Vanzi; Jose M. Fernández; Pedro Escarate; Vincent Suc

doi:10.1117/12.925567

24 September 2012 Development of telescope control system for the 50cm telescope of UC Observatory Santa Martina

Tzu-Chiang Shen, Ruben Soto, Johnny Reveco, Leonardo Vanzi, Jose M. Fernández, Pedro Escarate, Vincent Suc

Proceedings Volume 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II; 84511T (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.925567
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

The main telescope of the UC Observatory Santa Martina is a 50cm optical telescope donated by ESO to Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. During the past years the telescope has been refurbished and used as the main facility for testing and validating new instruments under construction by the center of Astro-Engineering UC. As part of this work, the need to develop a more efficient and flexible control system arises. The new distributed control system has been developed on top of Internet Communication Engine (ICE), a framework developed by Zeroc Inc. This framework features a lightweight but powerful and flexible inter-process communication infrastructure and provides binding to classic and modern programming languages, such as, C/C++, java, c#, ruby-rail, objective c, etc. The result of this work shows ICE as a real alternative for CORBA and other de-facto distribute programming framework. Classical control software architecture has been chosen and comprises an observation control system (OCS), the orchestrator of the observation, which controls the telescope control system (TCS), and detector control system (DCS). The real-time control and monitoring system is deployed and running over ARM based single board computers. Other features such as logging and configuration services have been developed as well. Inter-operation with other main astronomical control frameworks are foreseen in order achieve a smooth integration of instruments when they will be integrated in the main observatories in the north of Chile

Citation Download Citation

Tzu-Chiang Shen, Ruben Soto, Johnny Reveco, Leonardo Vanzi, Jose M. Fernández, Pedro Escarate, and Vincent Suc "Development of telescope control system for the 50cm telescope of UC Observatory Santa Martina", Proc. SPIE 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II, 84511T (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.925567

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