This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 10707 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and Conference Committee listing.

PANOPTES is a citizen-science based project to discover exoplanets with consumer cameras. It is open source and aims to be highly efficient at collecting photometric data by running a wide field survey using DSLR cameras and standard lenses. In the two years since the demonstration of the baseline design at SPIE 2016 the project has moved forward in getting the hardware design ready for citizen scientists and data analysis, benefiting from an influx of both professional and amateur support. At the same time the project has experienced a number of challenges related to the nature of a grassroots project with no specific institutional home. Here we present a status update to the project with a focus on the issues associated with creating, and maintaining, a successful “pro-am” astronomy project. This talk will specifically focus on a couple of keys concepts related to the operation of PANOPTES as a distributed observatory built by a collection of professional and amateur astronomers. These concepts can largely be broken down as: software; hardware; and organizational. However, a central theme of the talk will also be the fact that PANOPTES operates without a centralized institution, which means that decisions related to software and hardware are necessarily tied into the organizational decisions. Likewise, since the project has no official operating budget but operates largely off the budgets of each individual team (in addition to a NASA/JPL grant, the attainment of which will also be discussed), the hardware decisions and the evolving landscape of commercial over-the-counter (COTC) hardware play a significant role in the operation and maintenance of the project as a whole, which in turn affects how the software is developed. Through all of these areas PANOPTES has experienced successes and failures as well as simple deviations from original plans. As a project we have benefited enormously from the donation of time and storage on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), allowing us to explore technologies and solutions that would otherwise be unfeasible, but as an unofficial project we have been unable to secure a permanent formal agreement with GCP, creating challenges related to the long-term viability of those software solutions. Being a unique project that aims to be as scientifically productive as it is successful as an outreach tool, it is hoped that the talk will provide some valuable learned lessons for any future projects that hope to utilize the unique professional-amateur dynamic that exists within the field of astronomy and open-source software.

The international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to build two radio interferometers is approaching the end of its design phase, and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. A key part of this distributed Observatory is the overall software control system: the Telescope Manager (TM). The two telescopes, a Low frequency dipole array to be located in Western Australia (SKA-Low) and a Mid-frequency dish array to be located in South Africa (SKA-Mid) will be operated as a single Observatory, with its global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. When complete it will be the most powerful radio observatory in the world. The TM software must combine the observatory operations based at the GHQ with the monitor and control operations of each telescope, covering the range of domains from proposal submission to the coordination and monitoring of the subsystems that make up each telescope. It must also monitor itself and provide a reliable operating platform. This paper will provide an update on the design status of TM, covering the make-up of the consortium delivering the design, a brief description of the key challenges and the top level architecture, and its software development plans for tackling the construction phase of the project. It will also briefly describe the consortium’s response to the SKA Project’s decision in the second half of 2016 to adopt the processes set out by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for system architecture design and documentation, including a re-evaluation of its deliverables, documentation and approach to internal reviews.

The Observatory Control System (OCS) for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) includes all the software and hardware components necessary to control and monitor the GMT optical and electromechanical subsystems and to safely and efficiently operate the GMT observatory. The OCS architecture follows both a component-based and a model-based approaches. Software components are specified using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) which enables codegeneration in several languages and automatic validation of architectural conformance and interfaces. This paper describes the agile development process to generate the final software components from the specifications and the status of the whole development effort.

The Gemini High Resolution Optical Spectrograph (GHOST) is a dual-object integral-field unit fed echelle spectrograph currently under construction by an Australian-led consortium including the Australian National University (ANU), the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) and Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Center. The instrument control software for GHOST is under development by ANU. A brief overview of the relevant instrument subsystems is presented from the point of view of instrument control, along with a high-level overview of the software design. We discuss the operational concepts that have required specific software solutions, including IFU positioner collision avoidance, focal plane image reconstruction, and the guiding loop. We provide details of the various screens in the Acceptance Test and Engineering User Interface, showing how they support the operational concepts. The project comprises a variety of software technologies, including the Gemini Instrument Application Programmer Interface (GIAPI), ANU CICADA software, and various off-the-shelf packages. We discuss the use of these technologies, and our experiences with using them. The various different hardware devices also require specific software support, and we discuss our experiences with vendor-supplied libraries and code. We conclude with a brief outline of the development process, together with a discussion of successes and challenges.

This paper describes how we have sustained the Montage image mosaic engine (http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu) first released in 2002, to support the ever-growing scale and complexity of modern data sets. The key to its longevity has been its design as a toolkit written in ANSI-C, with each tool performing one distinct task, for easy integration into scripts, pipelines and workflows. The same code base now supports Windows, JavaScript and Python by taking advantage of recent advances in compilers. The design has led to applicability of Montage far beyond what was anticipated when Montage was first built, such as supporting observation planning for the JWST. Moreover, Montage is highly scalable and is in wide use within the IT community to develop advanced, fault-tolerant cyber-infrastructure, such as job schedulers for grids, workflow orchestration, and restructuring techniques for processing complex workflows and pipelines.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an 8.4m optical survey telescope being constructed on Cerro Pach´on in Chile. The data management system being developed must be able to process the nightly alert data, 20,000 expected transient alerts per minute, in near real time, and construct annual data releases at the petabyte scale. The development team consists of more than 90 people working in six different sites across the US developing an integrated set of software to realize the LSST science goals. In this paper we discuss our agile software development methodology and our API and developer decision making process. We also discuss the software tools that we use for continuous integration and deployment.

The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) software system contains distributed systems managed by a centralized Supervisory System. Interface software is generated from spreadsheets that describe commands, monitor points, and fault conditions for each subsystem. The Supervisory System consists of an Executive, Operator, Database Manager; one or more Supervisors plus Fault Manager, and Data Collectors. System-wide simulations are discussed: (1) a test framework is generated from the spreadsheets characterizing a subsystem; (2) a detailed simulation of the actual hardware in a subsystem; (3) a system-wide simulation of collecting astronomical data based on executing observing projects. The first two levels have been implemented.

The Atacama Large Millimeter /sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) has been working in operations phase regime since 2013. The transition to the operations phase has changed the priorities within the observatory, in which, most of the available time will be dedicated to science observations at the expense of technical time required for testing newer version of ALMA software. Therefore, a process to design and implement a new simulation environment, which must be comparable - or at least- be representative of the production environment was started in 2017. Concepts of model in the loop and hardware in the loop were explored. In this paper we review and present the experiences gained and lessons learned during the design and implementation of the new simulation environment.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next-generation ground-based instrument for detecting veryhigh energy gamma rays. It will consist of roughly 100 telescopes of different sizes and designs. In addition, a variety of auxiliary instrumentation will be part of the array. The Observation Execution System (OES) is the software system in charge of operating and monitoring all telescopes and devices, applying short-term observation schedules depending on the hardware status and environmental conditions and handling the data. Motivated by the wealth of tasks to accomplish and requirements to fulfil, a software development procedure is conceived for the development of OES. Part of this development process is the application of software testing procedures. These procedures range from unit tests up to system tests and stress tests. In this contribution, the software development process and the application of static and dynamic code analysis tools are described.

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) telescope control system is realised as a distributed control system, implemented predominantly in National Instruments’ LabVIEW. The telescope subsystems communicate using cyclic, state-based messages. Previously, we explored Data Distribution Service (DDS)—a data-centric publish-subscribe model for distributed application communication and integration, with the aim of using it as our primary communications middleware; however, obstacles uncovered during the implementation and roll-out of DDS prompted us to take a fresh look at the problem. We identified ZeroMQ (ZMQ) and NATS as possible alternative solutions. While ZMQ and NATS are both high-performance asynchronous messaging systems similar to DDS, the main difference between them is that ZMQ, in resemblance to DDS, is brokerless, whereas NATS is brokered. In a brokered system, the message broker mediates communication between a sender and a receiver, minimising the mutual awareness that applications need to have of each other in order to be able to exchange messages. Furthermore, less complexity is required in both the sender and the receiver of a message, when making use of a broker. A drawback of a broker, however, is that it may introduce a possible single point of failure. As a result of the simplicity of the client, coupled with the succinct NATS wire protocol, we were able to incorporate the NATS sender and receiver logic natively in our LabVIEW software. Taking advantage of a native solution removes the maintenance and deployment burden introduced by the use of an external C-language library, which is required for the use of both DDS and ZMQ. During our investigation of ZMQ we uncovered the same obstacles as we did with DDS, which involved the complexities of gracefully shutting down the communications logic when not using an object-oriented programming methodology. Due to legacy software, we have to maintain backward compatibility with a version of LabVIEW which predates the availability of built-in object-orientation in the language. This, coupled with the advantages of a native solution, led to the adoption of NATS as our messaging system. In this paper, we explore ZMQ and NATS as alternatives to DDS, accompanied with results of a performance evaluation of DDS, ZMQ and NATS against our home-grown legacy HTTP-based messaging implementation. We conclude with a summary and describe future work.

Astrophysics entered a new era where Big Data technologies and their related analysis paradigms are mandatory as off the-shelf tools for everyday duties. Although large HPC facilities and Grid Computing are offered for extremely intensive simulations to the community (for example in General Relativity, Magneto Hydrodynamics or Cosmological simulations) a number of medium sized problem, especially in the field of astrophysical numerical codes, are hard to be solved on premises and cannot approached with a proper computational architecture for large HPC. We present in this paper a case study application of computational power offered as unsold capacity on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). We concentrate here on two cases scenarios. In the first one we explore the cloud computing architecture for heavily parallelized CUDA based simulations for high resolution echelle spectrograph, while in the second one we report on architecture based on EC2 + S3 coupled with Docker for astrophysical simulations of Ultra Luminous X-rays Sources (ULXs) in nearby galaxies. Both architectures allowed us to decrease by order of magnitude the required CPU times by optimizing the overall cost.

MeerKAT, the 64-dish radio telescope built in the arid Karoo region of South Africa, uses Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) high-speed Ethernet networking equipment to distribute the high volume digitized and processed signal information between computing resources. On MeerKAT, the received analog signals (Horizontal and Vertical polarizations) are digitized at each dish and sent directly to the FX-Correlators data center network in the central processing facility via an extensive underground fiber network. This single data network is also used for data exchange between the correlator components, imager, archive and other instrumentation. MeerKAT welcomes external participation and contribution, and not all instrumentation reflects in-house development. For example, user-supplied equipment is used for pulsar timing, transient searches and even for the search for extraterrestrial life. Here, we describe the data-transfer characteristics of the equipment connected to the network, the network architecture, and the critical role of multicasting in the data distribution. We demonstrate how the flexible nature of the network allows for concurrent processing of the same data streams by different instrumentation and also for multiple, independent observations (subarrays). We conclude with preliminary research into the use of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for this data network.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Telescope, is an ongoing project set to start its building phase in 2018 and be ready for first light in 2020. The first part of the project, the SKA1 will be comprised of 130.000 low frequency antennas (50 MHz to 350 MHz) and 200 mid frequency antennas (350 MHz to 15.5 GHz). The SKA1 will produce a raw data rate of ~10 Tb/s, require a computing power of 100 Pflop/s and an archiving capacity of hundreds of PB/year. The next phase of the project, the SKA2, is going to increase the number of both low and mid antennas by a factor of 10 and increase the computing requirements accordingly. The key requirements for the project are a very demanding availability of 99.9%, computing scalability and result reproducibility. We propose an approach to enforce these requirements - with an optimal use of resources - by using highly distributed computing and virtualization technologies.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Astronomy and Space Science division operates the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a state-of-the-art radio telescope located at the Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. The data rates produced are significant enough that it is necessary to process in real-time in high performance computing (HPC) environment. This presents a number of challenges with respect to resource availability and the performance variability resulting from interactions of many parallel software and hardware components. These issues include: disk performance and capacity, inter-node and intranode parallel communication overheads, and process isolation. Typically, supercomputing facilities are used for batch processing of large established data sources or simulations. Small intermittent processing delays resulting from temporary resource contention issues do not affect these processes as the total compute time is the dominating factor and small wait times are insignificant. However, for real-time processing of high data ingest rates these small and unpredictable contentions for resources can be problematic. In our case, even delays of seconds can have a negative effect on our ability to reliably ingest the data. We have learned much from addressing these challenges and our experience and solutions will provide valuable input to the radio astronomy community, especially for larger projects, like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), where the same challenges will present at even larger scales.

Work in time-domain astronomy necessitates robust, automated data processing pipelines that operate in real time. We present the BANZAI pipeline which processes the thousands of science images produced across the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network of robotic telescopes each night. BANZAI is designed to perform near real-time preview and end-of-night final processing for four types of optical CCD imagers on the three LCOGT telescope classes. It performs instrumental signature removal (bad pixel masking, bias and dark removal, flat-field correction), astrometric fitting and source catalog extraction. We discuss the design considerations for BANZAI, including testing, performance, and extensibility. BANZAI is integrated into the observatory infrastructure and fulfills two critical functions: (1) real-time data processing that delivers data to users quickly and (2) derive metrics from those data products to monitor the health of the telescope network. In the era of time-domain astronomy, to get from these observations to scientific results, we must be able to automatically reduce data with minimal human interaction, but still have insight into the data stream for quality control.

In this contribution we present a multi-core system-on-chip, embedded on FPGA, for real-time data processing, to be used in the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST). Our system will provide “quick-look” magnetic field vector and line-of-sight velocity maps to help solar physicists to react to specific solar events or features during observations or to address specific phenomena while analyzing the data off line. The stand-alone device will be installed at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) Data Center. It will be integrated in the processing data pipeline through a software interface, and is competitive in computing speed to complex computer clusters.

The big data problem in Astronomy is a well now know issue, but in majority of the cases is constrains to volume of this data. Our propose take care of another aspect of the problem: the dimensionality problem, in the scope of multidimensional data especially Astronomical data cubes. We use tensor decompositions for two goals, first using tucker we achieve super compression rates that allowed to saving until 91% disks space and network traffic and second using a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC or Canonical Decomposition (CP) we build a system to find the multi-linear manifold in this astronomical cubes. Because this is a problem of BigData, for ours library we test three implementations: One approach over an intense use of GPU supported by PyTorch and using the traditional approach of HPC using MPI. Our proposed start from a simple but powerful idea, if we are dealing with multidimensional data (astronomical cubes), Why are we limited to use bi-dimensional techniques?. For example we use PCA for dimensionality reductions in spectral cubes instead of multidimensional approach that preserve the multi linear manifold inside this multidimensional data, we propose to pass from a linear algebra approach to a multi-linear algebra approach using tensor theory.

Mid-resolution InfRAreD Astronomical Spectrograph (MIRADAS), a near-infrared multi-object spectrograph for Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has 12 deployable optomechanical Integral Field Units (IFU). Based on a robotic probe arm with a pick-off mirror, each of these units can observe a different user-defined sky object. MIRADAS can work with target sets where their components are spread over such a wide area so that all of them do not fit in the field-of-view of the instrument. Therefore, data sets of that kind require, prior to capturing them, some arrangement that groups its elements in different subsets where the distance between the two most remote elements is inferior to the field-of-view diameter. This field segmentation is achieved using a hierarchical clustering technique. Our method relies on determining mutual nearest-neighbors, which will be merged if they show a given degree of similarity known beforehand. Moreover, we also compute a geometric center for these clusters, information to be delivered to the telescope’s pointing process. This step is formulated as the minimum bounding disk problem, which founds the center of the smallest radius circle enclosing all points of a cluster. Finally, we consider several real science cases and analyze the performance of the proposed solution.

The extension of on-board data processing capabilities is an attractive option to reduce telemetry for scientific instruments on deep space missions. The challenges that this presents, however, require a comprehensive software system, which operates on the limited resources a data processing unit in space allows. We implemented such a system for the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) on-board the Solar Orbiter (SO) spacecraft. It ensures autonomous operation to handle long command-response times, easy changing of the processes after new lessons have been learned and meticulous book-keeping of all operations to ensure scientific accuracy. This contribution presents the requirements and main aspects of the software implementation, followed by an example of a task implemented in the software frame, and results from running it on SO/PHI. The presented example shows that the different parts of the software framework work well together, and that the system processes data as we expect. The flexibility of the framework makes it possible to use it as a baseline for future applications with similar needs and limitations as SO/PHI.

The software model of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is a collection of instruments that are frequently modified or updated. Subsets of these instruments are combined for monitor and control, realtime servo control, or data processing. To better manage the complexity of this dynamic system, Green Bank Observatory (GBO) software developers created a dataflow application framework, called Matrix, which allows them to use common code for disparate activities. This paper describes Matrix application components, provides several examples of how the framework is used at the GBT, and details how others can obtain the framework.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a worldwide project aimed at building the next-generation groundbased gamma-ray observatory. CTA will be composed of two arrays of telescopes of different sizes, one each in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, to achieve full-sky coverage and a ten-fold improvement in sensitivity with respect to the present-generation facilities. Within the CTA project, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) is developing an end-to-end prototype of one of the CTA Small-Size Telescope’s designs with a dual-mirror (SST-2M) Schwarzschild-Couder optics design. The prototype, named ASTRI SST-2M, is located at the INAF “M.C. Fracastoro” observing station in Serra La Nave (Mt. Etna, Sicily) and has started its verification and performance validation phase in fall 2017. A mini-array of (at least) nine ASTRI telescopes has been proposed to be deployed at the CTA southern site, during the pre-production phase, by means of a collaborative effort carried out by institutes from Italy, Brazil, and South Africa. The CTA ASTRI team has developed a complete end-to-end software package for the reduction, up to the final scientific products, of raw data acquired with ASTRI telescopes with the aim of actively contributing to the global ongoing activities for the official data handling system of the CTA observatory. The group is also undertaking a massive production of Monte Carlo simulation data using the same software chain adopted by the CTA Consortium. Both activities are also carried out in the framework of the European H2020-ASTERICS (Astronomy ESFRI and Research Infrastructure Cluster) project. In this work, we present the main components of the ASTRI data reduction software package and report the status of its development. Preliminary results on the validation of both data reduction and telescope simulation chains achieved with real data taken by the prototype and simulations are also discussed.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is a 39 meters optical telescope under construction at an altitude of about 3000m in the Chilean Atacama desert. The optical design is based on a novel five-mirror scheme and incorporates adaptive optics mirrors. The primary mirror consists of 798 segments, each 1.4 meters wide[1]. The control of this telescope and of the instruments that will be mounted on it is very challenging, because of its size, the number of sensors and actuators, the computing performance required for the phasing of the primary mirror, the adaptive optics and the correlation between all the elements in the optical path. In this paper we describe the control system architecture, emerging from scientific and technical requirements. We also describe how the procurement strategy (centered on industrial contracts at subsystem level) affects the definition of the architecture and the technological choices. We first introduce the global architecture of the system, with Local Control Systems and a Supervisory Control layer. The Local Control Systems is astronomy-agnostic and isolate the control of the subsystems procured through industrial contracts. The Supervisory Control layer is instead responsible for coordinating the operation of the different subsystems to realize the observation cases identified for the operation of the telescope. The control systems of the instruments interface with the telescope using a well-defined and standardized interface. To facilitate the work of the Consortia responsible for the construction of the instruments, we provide an Instrumentation Control Software Framework. This will ensure uniformity in the design of the control systems across instruments, making maintenance easier. This approach was successfully adopted for the instrumentation of the Very Large Telescope facility. We will analyze the process that was followed for defining the architecture from the requirements and use cases and to produce a design that addresses the technical challenges.

The ELT primary mirror is a 39m diameter concave mirror composed of 798 mirror segments. Each mirror segment is equipped with edge sensors, position actuators and a surface deformation warping harness, independently controlled by their backend electronics. The controllers are mounted in cabinets grouping up to seven segments. Each cabinet contains a network switch and a PLC for power control, telemetry and auxiliary tasks. There are in total 132 cabinets, named segment concentrators, grouped in six sectors. This constitutes a system of more than 2600 networked endpoints, including micro controllers, PLCs and network switches, to be controlled and supervised. The M1 Local Control System (LCS) is the subsystem of the ELT responsible for the monitoring and control of M1 segments. Its main goal is to enable the phasing of the M1 mirror to compensate for the presence of disturbances such as changing gravity vector, thermal expansion and wind forces. M1 LCS will provide a reliable and deterministic infrastructure to collect edge sensor and position actuators measurements and to distribute new position references at a frequency of 500 Hz. In addition, the software is responsible for devices synchronization, monitoring, configuration management as well as failure detection, isolation and notification. The M1 LCS passed its final design review and the development commenced. The present paper summarizes the M1 LCS software design, including adopted patterns and technologies, and the current development status.

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) is a fully automated astronomical observatory located at the Sierra de Javalambre (Teruel, Spain) whose primary role is to conduct all-sky astronomical surveys with two unprecedented telescopes of unusually large fields of view: the JST/T250, a 2.55m telescope of 3deg field of view, and the JAST/T80, an 83cm telescope of 2deg field of view. The OAJ control system based on CIA model is a global tool to manage, monitor, control and maintain all observatory systems including not only astronomical subsystems but also infrastructure and other facilities. The OCS deployment is a standards-based development, taking advantage of technologies such as EPICS framework, EtherCAT Fieldbus and Beckhoff PLC hardware as open automation systems based on PC Control technology. The present paper describes the deployment of the OCS architecture, current status of the implementation, lessons learned and stimulating results of J-PLUS survey performed with JAST/T80 telescope, the open access to the Early Data Release (EDR) of the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey and next steps with JST/T250 telescope and J-PAS Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey.

Las Cumbres Observatory operates a global network of robotic telescopes with two classes of spectrograph distributed across telescopes with primary mirrors ranging from 1.0m to 2.0m. We present strategies and algorithms for performing precise robotic acquisition of a target source to a specified position in the focal plane and then maintaining the source in position for the duration of the spectrographic exposure(s). A high level algorithm with the ability to choose from a set of strategies for acquisition allows us to use a common code base to solve significantly different problems. We describe the three major components of each robotic acquisition: field identification to point the telescope precisely to the target coordinates; target identification and pointing refinement to precisely acquire the identified source; long term guiding to maintain the acquired position for the duration of the spectrographic observation.

The software framework for queue scheduling at the MMT Observatory (MMTO) is presented. This framework is part of the MMTO’s Observatory Manager (OM) that handles queue scheduling and many other observatory-related activities. The OM is divided into four overall components: 1) the “Web Frontend”, 2) the “REST API”, 3) the “Web Framework”, and 4) the “Scheduler Backend”. This paper emphasis the Scheduler Backend, which builds on the Python Astropy/Astroplan library with several new user-defined constraints and a custom sequential scheduler. These new constraints form an integral role in capturing the scheduling policies and priorities of the MMTO. The Scheduler Backend service can be run in two modes: 1) a “dispatcher” mode where observing blocks (OB’s) are ranked for a specific observing time, and 2) a “scheduler” mode where all OB’s are scheduled for the duration of the queue observing run. The dispatcher can be run multiple times throughout the night, as needed. The scheduler is typically executed once daily after sunrise after all data is collected for the night. Results from the dispatcher and scheduler are posted to a centralized Redis server for real-time monitoring of computing status and to relational databases for later review. Performance and optimization issues are discussed.

Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of 10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting challenge of identifying the most scientifically important events from this flood of data in order to conduct effective and timely follow-up observations. Several ongoing observing programs have proven databases to be extremely valuable in conducting efficient follow-up, particularly when combined with tools to select targets, submit observation requests directly to groundand space-based facilities (manual, remotely-operated and robotic), handle the resulting data, interface with analysis software and share information with collaborators. We draw on experience from a number of follow-up programs running at LCOGT, all of which have independently developed systems to provide these capabilities, including the Microlensing Key Project (RoboNet, PI: Tsapras, co-I Street), the Global Supernova Project (SNEx, PI: Howell) and the Near-Earth Object Project (NEOExchange, PI: Lister). We refer to these systems in general as Target and Observation Managers (TOMs). Future projects, facing a much greater and rapidly-growing list of potential targets, will find such tools to be indispensable, but the systems developed to date are highly specialized to the projects they serve and are not designed to scale to the LSST alert rate. We present a project to develop a general-purpose software toolkit that will enable astronomers to easily build TOM systems that they can customize to suit their needs, while a professionally-developed codebase will ensure that the systems are capable of scaling to future programs.

The Euclid mission is to be launched in 2022 to survey during 6 years 15,000 degrees2 of the extragalactic sky in order to characterize the Dark Universe. The mission planning problem and drivers are exposed. The current status of the mission planning software system and infrastructure, its requirements, design, challenges and current implementation are also presented.

The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) at the University of Arizona has discovered 47% of all known near-Earth objects (NEOs) and contributed 59 million observations to the Minor Planet Center.^[1],[2] CSS operates three telescopes fulltime, two of which primarily survey for new moving objects and one that follows up specific objects, particularly recent discoveries that may be NEOs. To be as efficient and effective as possible, CSS developed a flexible queue manager that enables all of our telescopes to perform both survey and follow-up observations as needed. The rate of discovery of new NEOs has increased greatly over the years, requiring a quantity of follow-ups that can only be accomplished with automated observing coordinated by a queue manager. Imaging moving targets also adds complexity, particularly the need for proper time intervals between images or the use of “track and stack” observing, necessitating that observations of multiple moving objects be properly interleaved in time. Targets are also added to and removed from the queue throughout the night when new discoveries are made or when objects are followed up by other telescopes. The CSS queue manager addresses all these challenges.

Since the start of operations in 2013, the ALMA Observatory software has become very large in terms of size and complexity requirements for stability, performance and quality have increased. In this work we describe the current status of infrastructure, tools and practices for software log analysis developed over the years to extract insights on the behavior of the system and to identify common pitfalls and points of failure. Thanks to the design and implementation of a logging infrastructure, temporal domain analysis and visualization tools, machine learning techniques and other ad-hoc solutions we have been able to speed up troubleshooting, anticipate issues and have a better understanding of the overall system behavior.

The proposed MOSAIC first-generation instrument for the ELT is a multi-object spectrograph utilising a combined MOAO and GLAO system. With 8 separate wavefront sensors (4 LGS and 4 NGS), and 10 separate deformable mirrors, in addition to the ELT M4 mirror, MOSAIC represents one of the most challenging ELT instruments for real-time control, using a total of approximately 65,000 slope measurements to control approximately 26,000 actuators with a 250 Hz LGS frame rate. The proposed modular design of real-time control system to be used with MOSAIC is presented. This is based on the Durham AO Real-time Controller (DARC), and uses 12x Intel Xeon Phi nodes (6U rack space, approx 2.5 kW under load) to obtain the required performance. We describe the prototyping activities performed at Durham, including estimates of AO system latency and jitter. The design challenges are presented, along with the techniques used to overcome these. The full modular architecture is described, including the system interfaces, control and configuration middleware, telemetry subsystem, and the hard real-time core pipeline. One benefit of our design is the ability to simultaneously test different AO control algorithms, which represents a significant opportunity for automatic optimisation of AO system performance. We discuss this concept, and present an artificial neural network solution for machine learning, which can be used to automatically improve MOSAIC performance with time. Algorithms that can be optimised in this way are discussed, include pixel calibration and processing techniques, wavefront slope measurement routines, wavefront reconstruction techniques and associated parameters, and temporal filtering methods, including vibration control. The hardware design for the real-time control system is presented, including an overview of the network architecture, the interconnections between computational nodes, and the method by which all pixels from all 8 wavefront sensors are processed concurrently.

Adaptive Optics (AO) is a necessary technology for ensuring the success of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). It’s used to help mitigate the perturbing effects of Earth’s atmosphere on the incoming light from astronomical objects and will be an integral part of ELTs for obtaining close to diffraction limited images. To maintain a correction of the incoming wavefront under dynamic atmospheric conditions, which can change significantly on the order of milliseconds, the frame-by-frame reconstruction must be operated in real-time, with hard limits on the time interval between measuring the disturbance and applying a correction. The main problem size for AO RTC increases with the 4th power of telescope diameter and so the computational demands of AO RTCs for ELTs, with primary mirror diameters between 20-40m, increase significantly compared to the current generation of 10m class telescopes. This makes the investigation into and the development of real-time controllers (RTCs) for ELT scale AO systems critical for ensuring the effectiveness of these instruments for first light. Green Flash, which is an ongoing EU funded project, has the aim of investigating the optimal hardware architecture for ELT scale AO RTC, with an emphasis on GPU and Xeon Phi solutions. The Intel Xeon Phi, built using Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, incorporates ≥64 general purpose x86 CPU cores into a single CPU package paired with a large pool of on chip high bandwidth MCDRAM, it has many of the advantages of current technologies without some of the more significant drawbacks. The most computationally intensive aspects of most AO RTC pipelines are large matrix-vector multiplications mainly used to compute the reconstructed wavefronts which are highly parallelizable and are generally memory bandwidth bound. This makes the Xeon Phi with it’s large CPU count and high bandwidth memory ideally suited for acceleration of the reconstruction task and therefore for ELT scale AO RTC. The most recent incarnation of the Xeon Phi platform is available as a standard socketed x86 CPU allowing previous efforts made in developing CPU based RTC software to be used as a basis for a Xeon Phi based RTCs with the added advantage that any optimisations made for the MIC architecture can be carried forward to future x86 CPU based systems. The Durham Adaptive Optics Real-time Controller (DARC) is an example of a freely available, on-sky tested, fully modular, x86 CPU based AO RTC which which is ideally suited to be a basis for our investigation into ELT scale AO RTC performance. We present a proof of concept AO RTC system, in collaboration with the Green Flash project, using an optimised DARC on a multi-node homogeneous Xeon Phi cluster to demonstrate the potential of the MIC platform for AO RTC. We will present our methods of optimisation for the C based DARC for the Xeon Phi, including BIOS, kernel and OS tuning as well as considerations for multi-threading and massively parallel algorithm development.

The Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics RelaY (MAORY) for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is an adaptive optics module offering multi-conjugate (MCAO) and single-conjugate (SCAO) compensation modes. In MCAO, it relies on the use of up to six Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and three Natural Guide Stars (NGS) for atmospheric turbulence sensing and multiple mirrors for correction, providing high Strehl and high sky coverage. In SCAO mode, a single natural source is used as reference, providing better correction but in a smaller field. MAORY will be installed at the Nasmyth focus of the ELT. It will feed the MICADO first-light diffraction limited imager and a future second instrument. MAORY is being built by a Consortium composed by INAF in Italy and IPAG in France and is currently approaching end of phase B. In this paper we describe the preliminary design of the MAORY Instrument Control System Software (ICS SW). We start with an overview of the MAORY module and then describe the general architecture of the MAORY control network and software. We then describe the main software components, with particular emphasis to those managing the NGS and LGS wavefront sensors functions and the AO off-load and secondary loops, and the main interfaces to subsystems and external systems. We then conclude with a description of the software engineering practices adopted for the development of MAORY ICS SW.

We present the outcomes of an evaluation of middleware technologies for adaptive optics real-time control against the requirements of the Green Flash project, which are derived from the most demanding requirements of proposed first generation E-ELT instruments. The technology down-selection process applied in Green Flash is described, and measured performance of the selected middlewares on the hardware of a Green Flash prototype RTC are presented.

We analysed the User Interfaces (UIs) in the control rooms of some radio-telescopes and found that the structure of the workflow that users have to follow in order to complete some tasks is often non optimal. This is worsened by the poor consistency of the UIs due to the number of different tools with different navigation mechanisms, different look and feel, and different representations of information that are used. In general, poor integration of the UIs leads to potential confusion and to higher cognitive load resulting in higher error rates, lower productivity, more frustration, reduced effectiveness. Therefore, when possible, it should be avoided. In this paper we provide concrete suggestions of what information needs to be integrated for focal tasks that are carried out in the control room of radio-telescopes, and what consequences could arise if some of this information is missing. For example, the alarm management task should be supported among others by details about failures, procedures to cope with the alarm, system logs, shift-reports and contact information of the persons involved. UI designers could take advantage of such suggestions to develop new UIs or to improve existing ones.

Over the past several years we have faced the need to develop a number of solutions to address the challenge of archiving large-format scientific imaging data and seamlessly visualizing that data—irrespective of the image format—on a web browser. ImageX is a ground-up rewrite and synthesis of our solutions to this issue, with a goal of reducing the workload required to transition from simply storing vast amounts of scientific imaging data on disk to securely archiving and sharing that data with the world. The components that make up the ImageX service stack include a secure and scalable back-end data service optimized for providing imaging data, a pre-processor to harvest metadata and intelligently scale and store the imaging data, and a flexible and embeddable front-end visualization web application. Our latest version of the software suite called ImageX 3.0 has been designed to meet the needs of a single user running locally on their own personal computer or scaled up to provide support for the image storage and visualization needs of a modern observatory with the intention of providing a ’Push button’ solution to a fully deployed solution. Each ImageX 3.0 component is provided as a Docker container, and can be rapidly and seamlessly deployed to meet demand. In this paper, we describe the ImageX architecture while demonstrating many of its features, including intelligent image scaling with adaptive histograms, load-balancing, and administrative tools. On the user-facing side we demonstrate how the ImageX 3.0 viewer can be embedded into the content of any web application, and explore the astronomy-specific features and plugins we’ve written into it. The ImageX service stack is fully open-sourced, and is built upon widely-supported industry standards (Node.js, Angular, etc.). Apart from being deployed as a standalone service stack, ImageX components are currently in use or expected to be deployed on: (1) the ODI-PPA portal serving astronomical images taken at the WIYN Observatory in near real-time; (2) the web portal serving microscopy images taken at the IU Electron Microscopy Center; (3) the RADY-SCA portal supporting radiology and medical imaging as well as neuroscience researchers at IU.

MICADO, the near-infrared Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations and ELT first light instrument, requires an instrument-specific observation preparation tool whose main task is the optimal AO guide star selection in combination with a compliant offset/dither pattern definition. In addition to the usual sky viewer and control GUI, this tool shall also be scriptable through an embedded Python interpreter which helps to facilitate repetitive preparation tasks, allows for automatic evaluation of potential observation targets, and enables the user to replace particular built-in functionality. We present our prototype implementation and show how a hybrid interface improves the usability for the observer.

The Central Authorization Service (CAS) is used by ALMA and some of its partners (ESO, NRAO) to secure Web applications and provide Single Sign-On. CAS has been in common use throughout academia for quite some time and is well suited for securing so-called "server side" tools – that is, applications taking care of the business logic as well as generating the HTML code for the User Interface (UI). Many Web applications are designed instead with a strong separation between a “single page” UI running in a browser and one or more back-end servers implementing the business logic; the back-ends may serve non-interactive clients, and may send requests to each other as well. Such a fragmented structure does not match CAS’ model very well and challenges system designers to come up with alternatives. This paper describes the CAS protocol and usage, comparing it to alternative authentication and authorization models based on OAuth 2.0 that can overcome the issues CAS raises. It also tries to plot a path forward based on industry standards like OpenID Connect.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a new instrument currently under construction for the Mayall 4-m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It will consist of a wide-field optical corrector with a 3.2 degree diameter field of view, a focal plane with 5,000 robotically controlled fiber positioners and 10 fiber-fed broad-band spectrographs. The DESI Instrument Control System (ICS) coordinates fiber positioner operations, interfaces to the Mayall telescope control system, monitors operating conditions, reads out the 30 spectrograph CCDs and provides observer support and data quality monitoring. In this article, we summarize the ICS design, review the current status of the project and present results from a multi-stage test plan that was developed to ensure the system is fully operational by the time the instrument arrives at the observatory in 2019.

The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is the first-light client instrument for the Narrow Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS) on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). IRIS includes three natural guide star (NGS) On-Instrument Wavefront Sensors (OIWFS) to measure tip/tilt and focus errors in the instrument focal plane. NFIRAOS also has an internal natural guide star wavefront sensor, and IRIS and NFIRAOS must precisely coordinate the motions of their wavefront sensor positioners to track the locations of NGSs while the telescope is dithering (offsetting the telescope to cover more area), to avoid a costly re-acquisition time penalty. First, we present an overview of the sequencing strategy for all of the involved subsystems. We then predict the motion of the telescope during dithers based on finite-element models provided by TMT, and finally analyze latency and jitter issues affecting the propagation of position demands from the telescope control system to individual motor controllers.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT)-Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) is a fiber-fed, precision radial velocity optical echelle spectrograph. The preliminary software design incorporates a hierarchical, multi-level state machine. At the lowest level, the state machine utilizes GMT-provided frameworks to communicate with the hardware. At higher levels of abstraction, the design makes extensive use of State Chart Extensible Markup Language (SCXML) representations to define the operation of the instrument. The functionality of the design can be validated by executing these representations. The incorporation of an interpreter to directly execute the SCXML as a component of the control system is being investigated. The approaches used to develop the preliminary software design concept are described, the use and utility of SCXML for instrument control is discussed, and the application of the preliminary design to a subset of G-CLEF subsystems is demonstrated.

SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) is a new spectrograph for the ESO NTT telescope, currently in the final design phase. The main instrument goal is to allow the characterization of transient sources based on alerts. It will cover from near-infrared to visible bands with a spectral resolution of R ∼ 4500 using two separate, wavelength-optimized spectrographs. A visible camera, primarily intended for target acquisition and secondary guiding, will also provide a scientific “light” imaging mode. In this paper we present the current status of the design of the SOXS instrument control software, which is in charge of controlling all instrument functions and detectors, coordinating the execution of exposures, and implementing all observation, calibration and maintenance procedures. Given the extensive experience of the SOXS consortium in the development of instruments for the VLT, we decided to base the design of the Control System on the same standards, both for hardware and software control. We illustrate the control network, the instrument functions and detectors to be controlled, the overall design of SOXS Instrument Software (INS) and its main components. Then, we provide details about the control software for the most SOXS-specific features: control of the COTS-based imaging camera, the flexures compensation system and secondary guiding.

The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) is a next-generation, adaptive optics assisted, near-IR imager and integral field spectrograph (IFS) for the Cassegrain focus of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Telescope 4. It will make use of the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), comprising the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the UT4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF). It is a rather complex instrument, with its state of the art AO system and two science channels. It is also meant to be a "workhorse" instrument and offers many observation modes. ERIS is being built by a Consortium of European Institutes comprising MPE Garching (D), ATC (UK), ETH Zürich (CH), Leiden University (NL) and INAF (I) in collaboration with ESO. The instrument passed Final Design Review in mid-2017 and is now in the MAIT phase. In this paper we describe the design of the ERIS Instrument Software (INS), which is in charge of controlling all instrument functions and implementing observation, calibration and maintenance procedures. The complexity of the instrument is reflected in the architecture of its control software and the number of templates required for operations. After a brief overview of the Instrument, we describe the general architecture of the ERIS control network and software. We then discuss some of the most interesting aspects of ERIS INS, like the wavefront sensors function control, AO secondary loops, IFS quick-look processing and the on-line processing for high-contrast imaging observations. Finally, we provide some information about our development process, including software quality assurance activities.

We built a multi-channel led starlight simulator capable to reproduce the radiation of stars of F, G, K and M spectral types in the wavelength range 365-940 nm. This range overlaps the photosynthetic active interval allowing us to use the simulator for biological experiments under radiation and atmospheric conditions close as much as possible to those expected on extrasolar planets. The simulator is a laboratory tool which is part of the “Atmosphere in a Test Tube” project, aimed to study the photosynthetic efficiency of bacteria under alien environmental conditions and their possible impact on the atmosphere of the host planet. This paper describes the software developed to control the simulator. We begin by presenting a conceptual overview of the instruments and then illustrating the top-level requirements and the architecture of the control software. Finally, we give a description of the graphical user interface.

The Mayall 4-meter telescope will soon host the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). To integrate DESI into Mayall’s software ecosystem we built an engineering data system called MED (Mayall Engineering Database) that meets the following requirements. (1) MED consists of proven, open-source components to minimize its development and deployment efforts. (2) MED collects data from various sources (log-rotated flat files, existing SQL databases, and our inhouse messaging protocol) to provide a single source for communication between the DESI software and Mayall’s existing subsystems (TCS, dome, primary mirror, weather stations) or future ones (e.g. new calibration lamps). (3) MED facilitates monitoring and troubleshooting by providing an easy way to graph time series in real time or graph time series collected over the past year. (4) MED facilitates generating audio-visual alarms in the control room (e.g. when the dome vignettes) as well as automated email alerts (e.g. when the computer room temperature exceeds 30ºC). (5) MED facilitates semiautomated generation of end-of-night metrics (actual time spent on science, instrument overhead, time lost to technical problems or weather, etc.) that go into a night-log report. (6) MED has persistent, long-term storage for metrics that help with performance analysis and strategic planning. (7) The part of MED essential for science operations at night has builtin capability for high-availability. (8) Finally, for maximum flexibility MED is schema-less. We describe MED’s design and open-source technologies. Our requirements involve 3 timescales, each with its own database: SQL (long) is for metrics that we need to keep forever. InfluxDB (medium) is a time series database that stores variables for one year and, along with Grafana as its visualization front-end, is for monitoring and troubleshooting. Redis (short) is an in-memory data structure store that lacks history, as it keeps the latest value for each variable, and is for system operations, acting as the message broker between subsystems. We outline our Redis data structure and its high-resolution time stamp. We also describe MED’s implementation techniques and show how we tie the open-source components together with scripts and config files, and take advantage of Fluentd, another open-source tool, to convert and pipe telemetry from one source to another with ease

The instrument FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive optics) is an integral field spectrograph (near infrared) operating at the wavelength range of 0.9 to 2.5um with imaging capability for being used at the Nasmyth B platform of the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC). FRIDA is a collaborative project led by the Instituto de Astronomía Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IA-UNAM, México) with the collaboration of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Spain), Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (CIDESI, México), the University of Florida (UF, USA), and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM, Spain). In imaging mode, FRIDA will provide scales of 0.010, 0.020 and 0.040 arcsec/pixel and, in IFS mode, spectral resolutions of R 1000, 4.500 and 30.000. FRIDA is the first GTC instrument to use the telescope Adaptive Optic (AO) system and it is rescheduled to be delivered to GTC shortly in 2020. Since FRIDA is a GTC instrument, the high-level control software of FRIDA is embedded within the distributed architecture of the System Control of GTC (GCS) and must fulfill the GCS software and hardware standards to control the telescope and the AO system. This paper shows an overview of the high-level control software components of FRIDA inside the GCS architecture. The main components are the Mechanisms Control System whose primary task is to control the mechanisms of FRIDA, the Data Acquisition System that interacts with the detector to take image, the Data Factory Agent whose task is to provide quality control for both engineering and scientific data, the Instrument Library component responsible for operating the devices associated to FRIDA and the Observation Manager component responsible for the execution of the observing sequences in close coordination with the GTC AO system.

MEGARA (Multi Espectrógrafo en GTC de Alta Resolución para Astronomía) is the new optical Integral-Field Unit (IFU) and Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOS) for the 10.4-meter GTC telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory (La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain). We describe in this contribution the Fiber MOS Assignment Tool (FMAT) and the Quick-Look Analysis Tool (QLA). The former enables MEGARA observation preparation both in the MOS and IFU instrument modes and the latter allows data visualization and quality assessment as it comes from the data reduction pipeline.

The System for coronagraphy with High Order adaptive optics in Kand H band (SHARKNIR), is a high contrast imager with coronagraphic and spectroscopic capabilities, which will be mounted at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). It will observe in the near infrared, between 0.96 and 1.7 microns. Its main scientific goal is the direct imaging of exo-planets, their detection and characterization, taking advantage of the adaptive optics offered by LBT. Other science objectives include brown dwarfs, protoplanetary discs, stellar jets, QSOs and AGNs. In this paper we describe the design and architecture of the SHARK-NIR instrument control software (SHINS). SHINS architecture is largely inspired to ESO VLT instrument control software: a central component dispatches commands to peripheral components dedicated to subsystems control. Observation, calibration and maintenance procedure are implemented by means of templates We also describe how communication between software components is implemented. We begin by explaining how we employed TwiceAsNice, a service oriented architecture framework, to control all the motorized functions. We also illustrate the interface to the control software for the tip/tilt subsystem, built inside SHARK-NIR and in charge of image stabilization. Then, we describe the interface implemented using the Instrument-Neutral Distributed Interface (INDI) communication protocol, which is used by SHINS to communicate both with the telescope and the scientific detector control systems.

The SKA project is an international effort (10 member and 10 associated countries with the involvement of 100 companies and research institutions) to build the world’s largest radio telescope. The SKA Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, monitoring the telescope and so on. To do that, TM directly interfaces with the Local Monitoring and Control systems (LMCs) of the other SKA Elements (for example, Dishes, Correlator and so on), exchanging commands and data with them by using the TANGO controls framework (see [1]). TM in turn needs to be monitored and controlled, in order its continuous and proper operation is ensured and this higher responsibility has been assigned to the TM SER package.

The SKA (Square Kilometre Array) Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope: it is aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, monitoring the telescope health status, diagnosing and fixing its faults and so on. Following the adoption of the Views and Beyond (V and B) approach [1] of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI [2]), it was discussed and agreed upon to take the opportunity to setup a TM Architecture Team (TMAT) composed by a combination of team members (who drove much of the work towards the main deliverables for the final review) and others (who can help shape the architectural design). The TMAT has to make sure that the main deliverables are well aligned with the overall TM architecture (including ensuring that the SEI approach is followed to the level agreed upon), and that there are no gaps and that cross-cutting issues are taken care of properly. This paper wants to analyze the challenges that the team has to face together with the solutions proposed to ensure that the quality of the deliverables are reached.

We describe the methods used to control 0.1 meter diameter crystal retarders on the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST). The DKIST retarders are required to arrive at, or pass through, requested positions within 7.407 microseconds of the expected time of arrival, with requested rotational velocities of up to 1,800 degrees per second. The motor control system has a Logistic distribution of the time error centered on the expected time of arrival with an RMS error of 1.232 microseconds at that angular velocity. We discuss the use of servo-cycle time compensation techniques, the advantages and disadvantages of the Parabolic Velocity Transfer used to transition between requested positions and velocities, and the methods used to tune both the motor control system and the time coordination system. We evaluate the motor controller’s performance with statistical methods and discuss the unexpected Logistic distribution of the arrival errors.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next generation ground-based observatory for gamma-ray astronomy at very-high energies. CTA will consist of two large arrays with 118 Cherenkov telescopes in total, deployed in the northern and southern hemispheres. The Observation Execution System (OES) provides the means to execute observations and to handle the acquisition of scientific data in CTA. The Manager and Central Control (MCC) system is a core element in the OES system that implements the execution of observation requests received from the scheduler sub-system. This contribution provides a summary of the main MCC design features and of the plans for prototyping.

We present design considerations and a prototyping progress report for a low-level monitor and control communication system designed to operate on the Stratix-10 System on a Chip (SoC) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) equipped with a Hard Processor System (HPS). The goal of this activity is to allow remote clients to use high level communication protocols (ie. TANGO) to access IP blocks within a Stratix-10 FPGA chip by taking advantage of very low latency communication between HPS and the FPGA fabric, eliminating the need to implement Ethernet protocols within the FPGA logic.

High resolution spectroscopy has been considered of a primary importance to exploit the main scientific cases foreseen for ESO ELT, the Extremely Large Telescope, the future largest optical-infrared telescope in the world. In this context ESO commissioned a Phase-A feasibility study for the construction of a high resolution spectrograph for the ELT, tentatively named HIRES. The study, which lasted 1.5 years, started on March 2016 and was completed with a review phase held at Garching ESO headquarters with the aim to assess the scientific and technical feasibility of the proposed instrument. One of the main tasks of the study is the architectural design of the software covering all the aspects relevant to control an astronomical instrument: from observation preparation through instrument hardware and detectors control till data reduction and analysis. In this paper we present the outcome of the Phase-A study for the proposed HIRES software design highlighting its peculiarities, critical areas and performance aspects for the whole data flow. The End-toEnd simulator, a tool already capable of simulating HIRES end products and currently being used to drive some design decision, is also shortly described.

We adopt a machine learning (ML) method, introduced in detail in our previous work, to mine spectroscopicallyconfirmed DB white dwarf (DBWD) from LAMOST Data Release(DR) 5. The unique features of DBWD are extracted from between known DB spectra and all other released data. We take advantage of these DBWD samples and features by classifying a certain amount of LAMOST spectral data by LAMOST 1D Pipeline. At first, two groups of clustering centers are produced as DBWD templates using k-means. Then, we build four control groups, whether to consider feature location and which clustering centers are employed, to conduct classification tests. The experiment demonstrates that taking particular features as weights of spectral data could improve classification accuracy.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Telescope and Site software team has adapted a previously described component template (SysML/UML model and code) to accommodate the project’s selected middleware (Service Abstraction Layer using the Data Distribution Service), message classification scheme, top-level state machine, operating system, command response paradigm, and extended settings requirements. The extended implementation easily accommodates extension for the use of any publish-subscribe protocol and isolates this behavior to make it easier to use. The revised component template remains a complete working application that developers extend in a precise manner to add application-specific behaviors. We report on the progress made designing and developing system components using the template and its application in the project workflow.

A guiding system is designed, implemented and tested for our 1.2-meter Quantum-Teleportation Telescope Imaging System, due to the lack of accuracy of its own star tracking function. This paper at first introduces some key technologies of the system including star extraction, offset computation, star tracking, offset conversion and exception handling. The guiding system is implemented as a RTS2 device, and interacts with a guiding CCD and telescope. The workflow control of the guiding process is pushed forward by a finite-state machine. The system is tested in Delingha, Qinghai province. In cloudless condition, the guiding system can work for 15 min continuously, and long-exposure images produced by main CCDs can meet scientific requirements.

WEAVE is a wide-field spectroscopy facility for WHT which includes a multi-object dual-beam spectrograph which will operate in the visible wavelength range. The blue beam will cover the range 360-600 nm and the red arm will cover the 580-960 nm range. In these ranges the spectrograph will offer a mid-resolution (~5000), while in three narrower wavelength intervals, two for the blue arm and one for the red one, the instrument will provide a high (~20000) spectrograph resolution. The spectrograph is currently entering the assembly and integration phase and the first light is foreseen in 2019. The entire WEAVE project is managed by an international consortium led by the University of Oxford. The spectrograph is controlled by a coordination process, the so called High-Level Server, which is part of the Observatory Control System (OCS) software suite, and is the single point of access to the embedded control system, the so called Low-Level Control Software, which is based on PAC technology. This paper describes the design of the embedded software for the control of the spectrograph mechanisms. We first describe the interface between high and low level software, then we present the PAC architecture and discuss the low-level state machine. Finally, we provide details on the principal program routines and describe the engineering interface.

The preferred programming languages and operating systems used in writing and running astrometric software have changed over time. The Python language is now well supported by the scientific community which provides open-source standard libraries for astronomical calculation including Astropy,¹ SciPy² and NumPy.³ We surveyed available open source astrometric libraries and compare ICRS coordinate to observation transforms using recent releases of C source code and Python wrappers from the IAU Standard of Fundamental Astronomy⁴ (SOFA), against those using the US Naval Observatory Vector Astrometry Software⁵ (NOVAS). The selection of an underlying operating system with long term support is also an important aspect of maintaining a working telescope control system. The installation and operation of the libraries under both Linux Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) and Windows 10 are explored.

The Liverpool Telescope has been in fully autonomous operation since 2004. The supporting data archive facility has largely been untouched. The data provision service has not been an issue although some modernisation of the system is desirable. This project is timely. Not only does it suit the upgrade of the current LT data archive, it is in line with the design phase of the New Robotic Telescope which will be online in the early-2020s; and with the development of a new data archive facility for a range of telescopes at the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand. The Newton Fund enabled us to collaborate in designing a new versatile generic system that serves all purposes. In the end, we conclude that a single system would not meet the needs of all parties and only adopt similar front-ends while the back-ends are bespoke to our respective systems and data-flows.

The Italian center for Astronomical Archives has, among its goals, to provide astronomical data resources as interoperable services based on IVOA standards. It did so for part of its archives (mainly raw telescope data from LBT, TNG and Italian national telescopes) and continued on with hosted data collections and providing expertise to national and international research projects (like WINGS, VIPERS, VIALACTEA). Its expertise and knowledge of the VO comes from active participation within IVOA and VO at European and international level, with a double-fold goal: learn from the collaboration (acquiring skills and technical knowledge) and provide inputs (implementations and feedback) to the VO community. In this scenario the first solution to build an easy to configure and maintain resource publisher conformant to VO standards proved to be too optimistic, not considering the complexity the IVOA architecture could have reached in a short while. For this reason it has been necessary to re-think the architecture with a modular system. This latter is now partially in place and will gradually replace the previous solution allowing for an easier to extend and rework if major changes will happen at the level of VO standards. The solution chosen for the architecture orbits around the messaging concept, where each modular component speaks to the other interested parties through a system of broker-managed queues (currently using AMQP with RabbitMQ as the broker). The messaging system lets us free to choose the development language for the business logic components, not only for the front-end, web interfacing solutions (needed to expose VO HTTP based protocols), but also on the archives and database access components, the logging systems and any other tool or component that may be needed in the future. The first implementation covered the simplest VO protocol, the Simple Cone Search, were the messaging task architecture connects the parametric HTTP interface to the database backend access module, the logging module, and allows multiple cone search resources to be managed together through a configuration manager module. Even if it has been initially used as a test for the new architecture, it already proved the flexibility required by the overall system when the database backend needed to be changed from a MySQL to a PostgreSQL+PgSphere solution. Another implementation test has been made to leverage task distribution over multiple servers dedicated to computation to allow for a single HTTP interface to serve simultaneously: FITS cubes direct linking, cubes cutout (using an AST and cfitsio engine) and cubes positional merging (using a Montage based solution). The solution proved also to be a quick answer to load distribution (although not really efficient). Alongside these the implementation of the SIA-2.0 standard protocol is ongoing, following the scheme used for the Simple Cone Search, while for the TAP protocol implementation we will be re-using and adapting the already available TAPlib library. Alongside this production, message-driven, publishers, a first administration tool (TASMAN) has been developed to ease the build up and maintenance of the TAP SCHEMA component of TAP services including also ObsCore maintenance capability. Future work will be devoted at widening the range of VO protocols covered by the set of available modules, improve the configuration management and develop specific purpose modules common to all the service components.

Astrocook is a new Python package to analyze the spectra of quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) from the near-UV band to the near-infrared band. The project stems from the lessons learned in developing the data analysis software for the VLT ESPRESSO spectrograph. The idea is to leverage numerical libraries like SciPy, NumPy, and Lmfit and astronomical libraries like Astropy to produce a collection of high-level recipes capable of interpreting the features observed in QSO spectra (such as the emission continuum and the absorption systems) in an automated and validated way. The package provides great flexibility in designing the operational workflow, as well as a set of interactive tools to apply the recipes in a seamless way. The aim is to achieve the combination of accuracy, stability, and repeatability of the procedure that is required by several compelling science cases in the era of ”precision cosmology” (e.g. the measurement of a possible variability in the value of fundamental constants, and the direct measurement of the accelerated expansion of the Universe).

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the next generation ground-based observatory for very high-energy gamma rays, is being built and will be operated by an international consortium. Two arrays will be located in the northern and southern hemispheres. Each telescope array will operate different numbers and types of telescopes. The Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) is leading the ASTRI (Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana) project in the framework of the small size class of telescopes (SST). A first goal of the ASTRI project is the realization of an end-to-end prototype in dual-mirror configuration (SST-2M). The ASTRI camera focal plane is composed of a matrix of silicon photo-multiplier sensors managed by innovative front-end and back-end electronics. The ASTRI SST2M prototype is installed in Italy at the INAF “M.G. Fracastoro” observing station located at Serra La Nave, 1735 m a.s.l. on Mount Etna, Sicily. The ASTRI Data AcQuisition (DAQ) system acquires, packet by packet, the camera data from the back-end electronics. The packets are then stored locally in one raw file as soon as they arrive. During the acquisition, the DAQ system groups the packets by data type (scientific, calibration, engineering) before processing and storing the data in FITS format. All the files are then transferred to the on-site archive. In addition, we implemented a quick-look component the allows the operator to display the camera data during the acquisition. A graphical user interface enables the operator to configure, monitor and control the DAQ software. Furthermore, we implemented the control panel algorithms within the framework of the Alma Common Software, in order to integrate the DAQ software within the ASTRI control software. The ASTRI DAQ system supports the camera AIV activities and operations. We provide the instrument workstation to support the AIV activities in the laboratory, and the camera server on-site. In this paper, we assess the ASTRI DAQ system as it has performed the AIV tasks for the ASTRI SST-2M prototype.

The Extremely Large Telescope[1] (ELT) is a 39 meters optical telescope under construction at an altitude of about 3000m in the Chilean Atacama desert. The optical design is based on a novel five-mirror scheme and incorporates adaptive optics mirrors. The primary mirror consists of 798 segments, each 1.4 meters wide. The architecture of the control system[2] is split in layers and in a high number of subsystems/components developed by different parties. This implies a high number of interfaces that must be designed and maintained under configuration control, to ensure a flawless integration of the different parts. Having interfaces (and data) definitions in a flexible central place allows us to extract several different artifacts (for example Interface Control Documents (ICDs), Interface Definition Language (IDL) files, tabular spreadsheets, help files, other generated code formats like code stubs or state machine implementations). In this paper, we explain how selecting a graphical modeling language like SysML and using graphical and tabular editing features made available by state of the art modeling tools presents a number of advantages with respect to other solutions like spreadsheets, a relational database, or a custom textual DSL. Still, using standard export/import formats (EMF XMI), we do not bind ourselves to a specific vendor. We describe the workflow that we have identified for the definition of interfaces, what artifacts we want to automatically produce and why. We also describe what technologies we are using to reach these objectives. A key aspect of this work is the selection of interface design patterns that are formal enough to allow automatic generation of the artifacts and, at the same time, pragmatic and simple to gain acceptance from all users and not incur in overhead.

An electronic traveler system has been implemented for the LSST Camera. Its purpose is to guide execution of procedures on the hardware and associate any resulting test data, analysis results and configurations with the tested devices. The system is accessible from a web browser or via a REST API and uses a MySQL database to provide a history of the assembly hierarchy, hardware locations and test procedure instances, along with locations of the resulting test data. Components of the system are entirely experiment-independent with the exception of the Data Portal web application, which provides expert knowledge by querying the eTraveler database.

The US National Park Service (NPS) preserves the natural night sky, to the greatest extent possible, as a natural resource and value. Our first step towards understanding and protecting the night sky is to assess the night sky quality. In the parks, we capture a series of overlapping high-resolution images to obtain a mosaic view of the entire night sky. The NPS Night Skies Program has specialized pipeline to perform data reduction and processing of these 45 one-million-pixel images taken by our mobile camera system. Specifically, the pipeline applies basic reduction, performs photometric calibration, mosaics the images to form the panoramic views of the entire night sky, generates the models for the natural sky brightness, and calculates values of different sky brightness metrics. This original data pipeline was developed mainly by a single person about a decade ago. These scripts are written in three different languages including Python, Java, and Visual Basic and interact with six different proprietary software packages including ACP Observatory Control, ArcGIS, MaxIm DL, Microsoft Excel, Photoshop, and Pinpoint. Although the current data pipeline is complete and functional, an upgrade is needed to make the pipeline distributable and manageable. Recognizing the challenges of moving forward, NPS Night Skies Program recently formed a pipeline development team for this upgrade effort. We, the members in the pipeline development team, are a multidisciplinary group of NPS staff with background in astronomy, geography, biology, and engineering. Geographically, we are located in both the mainland US and Alaska. Our goal is to transform the entire pipeline to be completely written in Python and minimize the number of required proprietary software. In addition, we will allow any future pipeline updates or new development to be made or suggested by any user instead of from a single-person initiated top-down model. For our pipeline upgrade project, we are using Git and GitHub for version control, project management, and source-code distribution. Once the upgrade is completed, the pipeline will be distributed via GitHub to NPS staff and partners located in Alaska, Nevada, Colorado, Tennessee, and Texas. All of our Python pipeline scripts will be open source where we hope to also benefit other scientists in the similar research field worldwide.

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph designed for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. PFS will cover a 1.3-degree diameter field with 2394 fibers to complement the imaging capability of Hyper SuprimeCam (HSC). The Fiber Positioning System (FPS) is an automated system that controls the sequences for the operation of the PFS subsystems to achieve accurate positioning of the science fibers for astronomical observations. FPS will be operated continuously for 14 hours a night and accomplish the fiber positioning sequence every 15 minutes. The success rate of each alignment should be 95% or more and FPS should finish the fiber alignment procedure in 105 seconds. A fast centroid algorithm is implemented for measuring 2349 fiber spots within 1 second. In this report, the latest status of the development of FPS system will be given, including the system performance and closed-loop simulations.

Filter is a key part for solar chromospheric telescopes. The core of its control system is a high-precision temperature control system. Traditional filter temperature control mode controls the average temperature by switching the heating wire. Such a control mode can not be used for space filters because it consumes a larger power supply. Depending on the space-based solar observatory being studied in China, space filter with automatic wavelength stabilization is being researched and the project intends to work out a method, so as to fit the circumstance in space and to automatically adjust the position through wavelength according to the subtle changes in ambient temperature. Considering the limit for space electronics, this paper describes the design of filter controller based on Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) and single chip microcomputer (SCM), which has stronger data processing ability for control algorithm and can be used to receive c1 ontrol commands and upload status. FPGA is used to build multiple communication ports, step motor control Intellectual Property (IP) cores and expand input and output interfaces. The controller can also be used in other telescopes, astronomical instruments and industrial control systems as well.

A new set of gratings with medium resolution (R ∼ 7500) has been mounted on the LAMOST spectrographs, and the wavelength windows range in 490 ∼ 540nm and 640 ∼ 690 nm respectively for blue and red spectrograph arm. Commissioning observation has been conducted to test the survey based on 16 spectrographs and 4000 fibers. Meanwhile, a spectral analysis pipeline has been developing to get more precise stellar parameters, radial velocities and abundance of chemical elements. Instrument profiles are calculated for each fiber at each exposure according to emission lines both from arc lamp. A template grid spectra with R ∼ 7500 for fundamental parameter (Teff, logg, and [Fe/H] ) are selected from Elodie. During the commissioning observation, each star have been visited for several times, and a fraction targets include APOGEE, Kepler and PASTEL objects which have high precisely measured parameters. With the commissioning spectra, we can understand instrument performance, intrinsic precision of repeat observations, and the accuracy of the pipeline.

The Astronomical Observatory of Trieste (OATs), part of the Italian Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), hosts a Celestron C14 telescope, equipped with a robotic Paramount ME equatorial mount, used for public outreach. The telescope is installed inside a dome, recently upgraded with a Beckhoff PLC control system, a SIEMENS inverter for the communication with the motor of the dome's roof, and further equipment to allow the complete automatization of the system. A peculiarity of the system is that, when operating, the telescope may exceed the height of the roof: due to this fact the telescope pointing is constrained by the full opening of the roof and, oppositely, the closing of the roof is allowed only when the telescope is in park position. Appropriate sensors are installed to monitor the position of the telescope to properly handle the complete opening or closing of the roof. Several emergency operations are also foreseen, for example in case of bad weather or lost connection with the user. The PLC software has been developed using TwinCAT software. An OPC-UA server is installed in the PLC and allows the communication with a web interface. The web GUI, developed in PHP and Javascript, allows the user to perform the remote operations like switching on all the instrumentations, open the dome's roof, park the telescope and view the status of the system. Furthermore through TheSkyX software it is possible to perform the pointing of the telescope and its set up. A dedicated script, interfaced with TheSkyX, have been implemented to perform a complete automated acquisition. An appropriate data storage system is foreseen. All these elements, that cooperate to create a fully remoted controlled system, are presented in this paper.

The TANGO controls framework community has put a lot of effort in creating the HDB++ software system that is an high performance, event-driven archiving system. Its design allows storing data into traditional database management systems such as MySQL as well as NoSQL database such as Apache Cassandra. The architecture allow also to easily extend it to other noSql database like, for instance, ELK. This paper describes the step needed to extend the HDB++ and explore the possibilities to use the ELK technology in term of analysis being enabled and tools provided.

METIS is the Mid-infrared E-ELT Imager and Spectrograph, one of three first generation instruments of the European Extremly Large Telescope (E-ELT). The primary mirror of the E-ELT has a diameter of 39 meter. This huge aperture requires an adaptive optics system in order to provide the performance close to the diffraction limit that is needed for all scientific observing modes of METIS. METIS will be be equipped with a single conjugated adaptive optics (SCAO) system that makes use of a near-infrared wavefront sensor. A real-time computer (RTC) reconstructs the wavefront and sends correction commands to the deformable mirror M4 and the field stabilization mirror M5. The METIS SCAO team evaluates computer workstations with the many-core processor Intel® Xeon Phi™ Knights Landing (KNL) for the real-time computation within the wavefront control loop. This processor is a promising candidate to satisfy the METIS AO needs as it allows for massively parallel computations. This parallelization is achieved by utilizing up to 272 logical CPUs, the new SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instruction set AVX-512 and the high-bandwidth on-CPU memory MCDRAM. This paper describes the SCAO RTC concept, evaluates the computational performance that a wavefront control loop could have when using a Xeon Phi KNL, and compares it to the identified requirements. The measurements will be conducted with the AO system software of the LINC-NIRVANA project under Linux. Especially, the real-time capability is analyzed.

In this paper we present a novel FPGA implementation of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems Image Data Compression (CCSDS-IDC 122.0-B-1) for performing image compression aboard the Polarimetric Helioseismic Imager instrument of the ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission. This is a System-On-Chip solution based on a light multicore architecture combined with an efficient ad-hoc Bit Plane Encoder core. This hardware architecture performs an acceleration of ~30 times with respect to a software implementation running into space-qualified processors, like LEON3. The system stands out over other FPGA implementations because of the low resource usage, which does not use any external memory, and of its configurability.

The ESPRESSO (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) spectrograph, after the preliminary tests carried out at the Astronomical Observatory of Geneva (Switzerland), has been shipped and re-integrated at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Cerro Paranal (Chile). The instrument control software, designed and developed at INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, had to face several challenges since ESPRESSO is the first instrument placed at the VLT Coud`e Combined Laboratory able to be fed by up to 4 Telescope Units simultaneously (through an incoherent focus), and whose electronics is based on Beckhoff PLCs. Moreover, ESPRESSO requires a careful stabilization of the field image in order to maximize the light flux through the fiber hole, and reach the instrumental radial-velocity precision level of 10 cm/s. These circumstances lead to the development of a few solutions specifically dedicated to ESPRESSO. In this paper we will summarize the features of the ESPRESSO control software, the tests performed during the integration phase in Europe, and discuss the main performances obtained during the commissioning phase and ”first light” observations in Chile

SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) is a unique spectroscopic facility that will operate at the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT) in La Silla from 2021 onward. The spectrograph will be able to cover simultaneously the UV-VIS and NIR bands exploiting two different arms and a Common Path feeding system. We present the design of the SOXS instrument control electronics. The electronics controls all the movements, alarms, cabinet temperatures, and electric interlocks of the instrument. We describe the main design concept. We decided to follow the ESO electronic design guidelines to minimize project time and risks and to simplify system maintenance. The design envisages Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) industrial components (e.g. Beckhoff PLC and EtherCAT fieldbus modules) to obtain a modular design and to increase the overall reliability and maintainability. Preassembled industrial motorized stages are adopted allowing for high precision assembly standards and a high reliability. The electronics is kept off-board whenever possible to reduce thermal issues and instrument weight and to increase the accessibility for maintenance purpose. The instrument project went through the Preliminary Design Review in 2017 and is currently in Final Design Phase (with FDR in July 2018). This paper outlines the status of the work and is part of a series of contributions describing the SOXS design and properties after the instrument Preliminary Design Review.

The instrument FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive optics) is an integral field spectrograph (near infrared) with imaging capability for being used at the Nasmyth B platform of the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC), behind the Adaptive Optics (AO) system. FRIDA is the first GTC instrument to use the telescope AO system. FRIDA is a collaborative project between institutions from México, Spain and the USA. In image mode, FRIDA provides scales of 0.010, 0.020 and 0.040 arcsec/pixel and, in integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) mode, spectral resolutions R 1000, 4.500 and 30.000. FRIDA has a set of different mechanisms (such as the focal plane wheel, the filters and pupil wheels, the cameras wheel, the calibration unit, the grating carousel) that are controlled and coordinated by the FRIDA Instrument Library (IL). In this paper, we present the IL, which provides the implementation of a Device that represents the instrument FRIDA as a whole. More specifically, the IL implements the commands for setting-up and coordinating the different mechanisms of FRIDA for an observation. It moves the mechanisms, exposes the detector, and reduces and stores the data image. In addition, we also present the Observation Manager (OM) component, responsible for the execution of the science observing sequences in close coordination with the IL and GTC AO system.

We present the design of the HARPS3 software system – a distributed, event-driven control system for robotic operation of the HARPS3 spectrograph at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). We also describe our approach to integrating the control software components incrementally at various stages of development, using a simulation framework. HARPS3 will be a high resolution (R = 115, 000) echelle spectrograph operating at wavelengths from 380 nm to 690 nm, with a design based on the successful HARPS and HARPS-N instruments. It is being built as part of the Terra Hunting Experiment (THE) – a planned 10 year radial velocity measurement programme to discover Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars.

Based on our experiences on developing software for Antarctica Survey Telescope (AST3), we propose a software standard of controlling and operating system for real unattended robotic observatories. Besides automaticity, this standard addresses special issues of high availability, fault-tolerance, power efficiency, etc., which are much less important for matured observatories but become crucial for real unattended observatories, e.g., Antarctica sites or space telescope. Our recommended standard defines sets of common instructions to operate all the facilities of an observatory. For each instruction, the standard specifies its function, how it responses when a hardware or software exception arises and informs users in detail. Then it specifies an application programming interface (API) so that user programs know how to call it to execute a certain operation. Finally, we propose feasible inter process communication protocols for the API implementation as well as managing the special redundant hardware. By calling the universal API users can easily develop their own software to control and operate an astronomical observatory robustly and fully automatically with minimum human intervention, even if their devices are highly customized.

A new guide probe, using a Pyramid WaveFront Sensor (PWFS), has been built for the guider port of the Robert Stobie Spectrograph (RSS) on the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). The PWFS splits the light from a guide star into a double image of the star at the guider image plane. These two images move with respect to each other with changes in focus. Analysis of the movements in such two-star images allows for simultaneous tracking and focus adjustments while guiding. This paper describes the image processing software developed for the new guidance system. The PWFS is a custom made prism with a 9 degree prism apex angle. Incident light is split as it passes through the prism resulting in two images identical in shape, size and orientation resolving at the guider image plane. A point source, like a star, thus appears as a double image of the star at the image plane. These two images are affected identically with seeing fluctuations allowing one or both images to be used to calculate guidance offsets independently of the focus measurement. The separation of the two images correlates to the focus divergence from the ideal which is used to correct the telescope focus. The prism can be moved off to one side, such that the incident light is not split. In this configuration the guide probe provides guidance offsets without the focus adjustments for maximum sensitivity with dim guide. The software was developed using existing guider images to ensure that the algorithm could handle the image artefacts that are commonly encountered. To reduce processing time and the effects of anomalies the surrounding image is masked out leaving only the star. A centroiding algorithm is then applied to the star to estimate its location in the image. For PWFS double-star images, Zemax was used to model the effect of shifting focus on the light passing through the prism. From this a simulated data set was produced and the software expanded to detect the two stars and measure the separation. The software is capable of measuring star translational movements and double star separation reliability and accurately.

After encountering difficulties in coordinating the compilation of the daily SALT software log between Sutherland and Cape Town, and struggling to identify the configuration of the telescope at a point in time, a new, automated system to record and consolidate the changes made to the telescope on a day-to-day basis has been developed. This has resulted in a reduction of administration overhead, more complete and timeous reporting of changes, and a daily report that is consistently formatted and contains easily searchable metadata.

Adopting the recommendations for the control room obtained by a user-centered design approach for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the following characteristics for the SKA Graphical User Interface (GUI) have been identified: scalability, integrated tools, extendability and completeness. The lack of one or more of these characteristics could lead to usability problems like low user’s efficiency, high error rate, high user’s mental load and user’s frustration. In this paper one of the most recent web technologies that enable the user-centered design are analyzed. TangoWebApp, a pluggable web platform integrated with TANGO Control REST API, appears very suitable also taking into account the adoption of TANGO as the SKA control framework. Starting from a SKA Telescope Manager (TM) Services use case, a prototype has been developed composed by a series of TANGO WebApp plugins that allow the operator to correctly and efficiently complete the tasks of the scenario. Some of the plugins, in particular, have been developed to extend the functionalities of the TANGO WebApp itself to make it fully compliant with the User Centered Design. As a result of this work, the TangoWebapp proved itself not only fully compliant with the User Centered Design, but also flexible enough to add functionalities in the form of properly developed plugins. These characteristics of the TangoWebapp, together with its unique feature to be integrated into TANGO, make it a good candidate to be the SKA GUI platform.

In the context of developing the user interfaces (UIs) for the control room of SKA (Square Kilometer Array) we analysed the UIs of existing radio-telescopes from the perspective of the human visual perception processes, in order to identify ways to make important information more efficiently communicated to operators and astronomers on duty. It is known that visual information can be processed much faster than text and that images are more effective for remembering information. Our study shows that operators and astronomers have to rely predominantly on text-based UIs. For example, only colour changes and audible signals are used to attract users attention, while motion, animation or change in shape are usually neglected. Likewise, preattentive features are seldom used to focus user’s attention on important information. When running the telescope operators are likely to be concentrated on specific tasks and could fail to notice changes in the UI unless these changes are made as easy to find as possible. In this paper we identify parts of the UIs that could benefit by a wider exploitation of visual information; they include the health monitor, the weather monitor and the scheduler, and give some initial suggestions of possible solutions.

The advancement of technology in telescopes and observation instruments has allowed more and more data to be available with higher resolutions and quality, but the way to obtain this data is the same, astronomers are conditioned obtain observation time. Once the data is public in most cases fall into disuse and except with initiatives such as virtual observatories that seek to offer this data over standards and protocols for storage and access, the data are not used again. Our proposal seeks to recover these large volumes of observations already made and offer them as a cloud service from a High Performance Computing environment to be reprocessed by the scientific community with the aim of generating new science from them, for this in the Chilean Virtual observatory we have created ChiVOLabs, a system that has a microservice architecture on Docker that allows us, based on searches in our virtual observatories, to offer the possibility of reprocessing ALMA data through a Jupyter Notebook interface. The process start using the IVOA protocol: Simple Cone Search to find the astronomical data and then select the option to reprocess them. Our architecture create a DOCKER environment with the entire analysis stack of ChiVO and Python in our datacenter, furthermore transforms the reduction script used to generate the original product in a jupyter notebook automatically connected to our CASA cluster (Pipleine of reduction of ALMA). Finally we search in our datalake raw ALMA data, known as ADSM, from which is generated the selected product and are created a link to these raw in the container. With this we offer the scientific community the possibility of reprocessing these data according to their scientific interests and generating new data products that can finally be downloaded or continue to be working with our libraries using the full power of our datacenter

The Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) is one of the most important ESO projects developed for the VLT programme in the last years. The AOF, currently still under commissioning, brings built-in AO capabilities (GLAO and LTAO) to one of the VLT 8m Telescopes (Yepun) that is now equipped with a deformable secondary mirror (DSM), four lasers guide stars (4LGSF) and two AO modules: GRAAL for the HAWK-I infrared imager and GALACSI for the MUSE 3D spectrograph. This paper describes the main aspects of the software responsible for the control and monitor of the two AO modules, as well as for the coordination of subsystems like the instruments and the telescope. Furthermore details of the strategy followed to minimize the impact on configuration control associated to several commissioning periods interleaved with normal operations will be given. The control software package consist of a set of modules based on the VLT Instrumentation Framework and on the VLT platform for AO Real-Time Applications (SPARTA). We will present the software and control design choices that have contributed to the successful commissioning and science verification of GALACSI Wide Field Mode (WFM) and the first verifications of GRAAL tip/tilt free mode covering the control of challenging devices such as the GRAAL Corotator or the GALACSI visible Field Selector together with the innovative and flexible implementation of the AO acquisition sequence and its seamless integration to the instrument observations, the handling of secondary loops and the development of health-check and commissioning scripts (templates) that automated the verification of the different observing modes.

In an era when spectroscopic surveys are capable of collecting spectra for hundreds of thousands of stars, fast and efficient analysis methods are required to maximize scientific impact. These surveys provide a homogeneous database of stellar spectra that are ideal for machine learning applications. One such application, StarNet, is a convolutional neural network developed to derive stellar labels (temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity) from both SDSS-III APOGEE and synthetic stellar spectra. It has demonstrated excellent precision and accuracy over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios, when trained on either observed or synthetic spectra. Though StarNet was developed using the high-resolution (R ∼ 20, 000) APOGEE spectra and corresponding ASSeT synthetic grid, we suggest that this technique is applicable to other spectral resolutions, spectral surveys, and wavelength regimes. As a demonstration, we present a version of StarNet trained on lower resolution, R=6000, ASSeT synthetic spectra. This resolution was selected to prepare for spectra delivered by Gemini/NIFS and the forthcoming Gemini/GIRMOS instruments. Results suggest that the stellar parameters determined from this medium-resolution StarNet version can be comparable in precision to the high-resolution APOGEE results. This success can be attributed to (1) a large training set of synthetic spectra (N∼200,000) with a priori stellar labels, and (2) the use of the entire spectrum in the solution rather than a few weighted windows, which is common in other automated spectral analysis methods (e.g. FERRE). Remaining challenges in our StarNet applications include rectification, continuum normalization, and wavelength coverage. Here with present preliminary results on the impact of imperfect continuum rectification when compared to normalized synthetic data. Solutions to these problems will contribute to efficient spectroscopic surveys, their data reduction pipelines, and the precision in their post-data products (for the planned Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer).

The One Degree Imager - Portal, Pipeline and Archive (ODI-PPA) - a mature and fully developed product - has been a workhorse for astronomers observing on the WIYN ODI. It not only provides access to data stored in a secure archive, it also has a rich search and visualization interface, as well as integrated pipeline capabilities connected with supercomputers at Indiana University in a manner transparent to the user. As part of our ongoing sustainability review process, and given the increasing age of the ODI-PPA codebase, we have considered various approaches to modernization. While industry currently trends toward Node.js based architectures, we concluded that porting an entire legacy PHP and Python-based system like ODI-PPA with its complex and distributed service stack would require too significant an amount of human development/testing/deployment hours. Aging deployment hardware with tight budgets is another issue we identified, a common one especially when deploying complex distributed service stacks. In this paper, we present DockStream (https://jsportal.odi.iu.edu), an elegant solution that addresses both of the aforementioned issues. Using ODI-PPA as a case study, we present a proof of concept solution combining a suite of Docker containers built for each PPA service and a mechanism to acquire cost-free computational and storage resources. The dockerized ODI-PPA services can be deployed on one Dockerenabled host or several depending on the availability of hardware resources and the expected levels of use. In this paper, we describe the process of designing, creating, and deploying such custom containers. The NSF-funded Jetstream led by the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), provides cloud-based, on-demand computing and data analysis resources, and a pathway to tackle the issue of insufficient hardware refreshment funds. We briefly describe the process to acquiring computational and storage resources on Jetstream, and the use of the Atmosphere web interface to create and maintain virtual machines on Jetstream. Finally, we present a summary of security refinements to a dockerized service stack on the cloud using nginx, custom docker networks, and Linux firewalls that significant decrease the risk of security vulnerabilities and incidents while improving scalability.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is responsible for developing the SKA Observatory, the world's largest radiotelescope ever built: eventually two arrays of radio antennas - SKA1-Mid and SKA1-Low - will be installed in the South Africa's Karoo region and Western Australia's Murchison Shire, each covering a different range of radio frequencies. In particular SKA1-Mid array will comprise 133 15m diameter dish antennas observing in the 350 MHz-14 GHz range, each locally managed by a Local Monitoring and Control (LMC) system and remotely orchestrated by the SKA Telescope Manager (TM) system. Dish LMC will provide a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be used for monitoring and Dish control in standalone mode for testing, TM simulation, integration, commissioning and maintenance. This paper gives a status update of the LMC GUI design involving users and tasks analysis, system prototyping, interface evaluation, provides details on the GUI prototypes being developed and technological choices and discuss key challenges in the LMC UI architecture, as well as our approaches to addressing them. In the GUI design task we have adopted a Usage-Centered Design (UCD) approach based on the early involvement of users whose feedback is being iteratively considered in analysis phases, as well as in design and evaluation. An IFML based user interaction modeling approach has been adopted.

The ASTRI SST-2M telescope is a robotic end-to-end prototype, installed on Mount Etna (Italy) and proposed for the Small Size class of telescopes of the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The ASTRI prototype is currently operative and it is undergoing the scientific verification stages. In the next future a first set of nine ASTRI telescopes is foreseen for the early implementation of the CTA southern site. In this contribution we present the general design of the monitoring system for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure of the ASTRI SST-2M prototype. The ASTRI ICT monitoring system is composed by specific custom tools which interface the ICT device, through the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) protocol, to the Alma Common Software (ACS), which is the high-level framework used to operate the ASTRI SST-2M prototype. The main purpose of these tools is to convert the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), used in the ICT devices, into the OPC-UA protocol, through the implementation of an appropriate OPC-UA server. This server interacts with an OPC-UA client implemented as ACS components, which are able to provide all the ICT monitoring parameters, through the ACS notification channel and sends alerts to the central console of the ASTRI SST2M telescope prototype. ICT monitoring data are also saved into the ACS Telescope Monitor Communication Data Base (TMCDB), like those of the other telescope subsystems. The same approach has been proposed for the monitoring of the CTA on-site ICT infrastructures.

Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is the first light instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) that consists of a near-infrared (0.84 to 2.4 micron) imager and integral field spectrograph (IFS) which operates at the diffraction-limit utilizing the Narrow-Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS). The imager will have a 34 arcsec x 34 arcsec field of view with 4 milliarcsecond (mas) pixels. The IFS consists of a lenslet array and slicer, enabling four plate scales from 4 mas to 50 mas, multiple gratings and filters, which in turn will operate hundreds of individual modes. IRIS, operating in concert with NFIRAOS will pose many challenges for the data reduction system (DRS). Here we present the updated design of the real-time and post-processing DRS. The DRS will support two modes of operation of IRIS: (1) writing the raw readouts sent from the detectors and performing the sampling on all of the readouts for a given exposure to create a raw science frame; and (2) reduction of data from the imager, lenslet array and slicer IFS. IRIS is planning to save the raw readouts for a given exposure to enable sophisticated processing capabilities to the end users, such as the ability to remove individual poor seeing readouts to improve signal-to-noise, or from advanced knowledge of the point spread function (PSF). The readout processor (ROP) is a key part of the IRIS DRS design for writing and sampling of the raw readouts into a raw science frame, which will be passed to the TMT data archive. We discuss the use of sub-arrays on the imager detectors for saturation/persistence mitigation, on-detector guide windows, and fast readout science cases (< 1 second).

The data reduction software for the Gemini High Resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST) presents a number of unusual challenges. Star light from one or two objects and simultaneous sky is collected in integral field units rather than a slit or well-separated fibers. When used with binning, individual fibers are not resolved, and the optimal pixel weighting is derived from a simultaneous slit viewing camera. We describe the data reduction approach taken, including testing using an optical physics-based data simulator, and an object-oriented and modular approach to spectral extraction that fits within the Gemini recipe system, DRAGONS, using AstroConda.

The recently reinvented Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) has undergone a multi-year upgrade replacing the wide- field corrector, tracker, and metrology systems. The timelines for the production and delivery of the various upgrade components, combined with the desired turn around on deployment and integration, required that a majority of the core control system software functionality be implemented, and notionally tested, without access to the related hardware. We present the approaches to simulating the HET hardware systems, their evolution, the successes and shortcomings of the current level of capabilities, and ideas for improvements to simulation and integration testing.

The environmental conditions that allow optimal astronomical observations are often coupled with sites that are far away from human settlements and of difficult access, implying limited infrastructure availability that translates in excessive costs and limited bandwidth. With the availability and more affordability of optical based technologies, the astronomical scientific community, alone or joining forces with other actors, has managed in the last decade to boost the communication capability available to several of the astronomical installations in the northern Chilean region, the Atacama Desert, and to successfully increase the efficiency and effectivity of the existing Observatories and setting the basis for the coming ones. The paper, after providing a short summary of the projects developed to enable better communications and the future initiatives currently foreseen, focuses on the following show‐cases, from users that differ in size and aims, in served communities and in geographical locations: a) the observation of the First Light from Gravitational Wave Source (ESO, ALMA, et Al.); b) the use of virtual presence to bring the observer where things happen (ESO/PARANAL); c) remote operations for robotic installation (OCA); d) Contributing to develop the local environment (REUNA); e) provide the “muscle” for the current and future data challenge (ALMA). These examples, by illustrating how communication transformed the way research and education are done, demonstrate that improved communication is paramount in achieving better and, in some case, new astonishing results, both in terms of science and as well as enriching the communities, both scientific and in general.