TELICS—A Telescope Instrument Control System for Small/Medium Sized Astronomical Observatories

Abstract

Although the astronomy community is witnessing an era of large telescopes, smaller and medium sized telescopes still maintain their utility being larger in numbers. In order to obtain better scientific outputs it is necessary to incorporate modern and advanced technologies to the back-end instruments and to their interfaces with the telescopes through various control processes. However often tight financial constraints on the smaller and medium size observatories limit the scope and utility of these systems. Most of the time for every new development on the telescope the back-end control systems are required to be built from scratch leading to high costs and efforts. Therefore a simple, low cost control system for small and medium size observatory needs to be developed to minimize the cost and efforts while going for the expansion of the observatory. Here we report on the development of a modern, multipurpose instrument control system UNICS (Unified Instrument Control System) to integrate the controls of various instruments and devices mounted on the telescope. UNICS consists of an embedded hardware unit called Common Control Unit (CCU) and Linux based data acquisition and User Interface. The Hardware of the CCU is built around the Atmel make ATmega 128 micro-controller and is designed with a back-plane, Master Slave architecture. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed based on QT and the back end application software is based on C/C++. UNICS provides feedback mechanisms which give the operator a good visibility and a quick-look display of the status and modes of instruments. UNICS is being used for regular science observations since March 2008 on 2m, f/10 IUCAA Telescope located at Girawali,

A Complete Affordable Control System for Remote Astronomical Observing Accompanied by an Intelligent Controller

“…Over recent years, remote control technology and sensors have continually evolved and advanced, giving the facility for remote observing development [11]. Because of the design of small and medium-sized observatories not supporting remote operation [12], several attempts have been implemented to upgrade them to run remotely at low cost. For instant, Lowa robotic observatory is considered the first operation of remote observation in the 1990s [13].…”

“…Furthermore, in the face of system uncertainties, conventional proportional-derivative (PD) and PID controllers have some difficulty as their defects of high O sh and R s are inappropriate. Since the design of small and medium-sized observatories does not support remote operation [12], the modification requires extra hardware and software to overcome the absence of the human attendance [22]. The dome is represented the main obstacle toward remote operation as a reason for its manual operation in rotation and shutters handling.…”

Design and development of an optical-fibre-based Integral Field Unit (IFU) on the IUCAA 2-m telescope

“…These wheels carry several narrow‐band filters and a fold mirror, which can direct light into IFOSC from a set of lamps for flat‐field and spectral calibration. During the observations, these wheels are moved using an automated control system (Srivastava et al 2009) to bring the desired component (filter or fold mirror) into the path of the telescope beam.…”