The Ritchey-Chrétien 1.2 m telescope (EULER) and the High-Resolution echelle Spectrograph (CORALIE), a new Swiss observing facility at ESO La Silla Observatory, are operational since Summer 1998. The Observatory operation is fully automated and supports the unattended, attended and interactive mode of operation under local or remote control. The control hardware is based on Local Control Units (LCU) built from PC/RedHat Linux computers and a Unix Computing Server. The Operational Software (OS) is built around INTER, a command language interpreter featuring communication control, data access, image processing functions and easy access to external resources. The general SW architecture is a non-hierarchical tree of pairs made of hardware-independent interpreters running on the Observing Server and hardware dependent servers running on the LCUs. The Operational Software includes the full access (Creation/Modification/Retrieval) to the input/output databases, telescope, instrument and auxiliary set-up and control files as well as a full data-reduction pipeline. We describe briefly the system architecture, summarize the performances and the experience gained over 18 months of operation and we discuss some critical issues: use of standard components , parallel operation, real-time requirements, system upgrade and maintenance.
The Geneva Observatory has built two new 1.2-meter twin telescopes, one of them already operating in Chile since May 1998. The second prototype will be installed at the end of the year 2000 on the Canary Island La Palma (Spain). The technological complexity of these alt-azimuthal telescopes, as well as the operational constraints (an observer should be able to command on his own the whole infrastructure) required a control system taking care of all observation tasks, similar to the ones mounted on much larger telescopes. This paper presents the hardware and the distributed software architecture of this 1.2-meter telescope control system, entirely designed and built by the Geneva Observatory. The modular concept and the choices of hardware tested in industrial automation made it possible to obtain great operational robustness and guarantee for long-term maintenance. The adopted solution is based on a transputer tree-network. The interactions between telescope and observer are transparent and completely integrated in the observation software of the attached instrument.
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