RTS2: a powerful robotic observatory manager

Petr Kubánek; Martin Jelínek; Stanislav Vítek; Antonio de Ugarte Postigo; Martin Nekola; John French

doi:10.1117/12.672045

27 June 2006 RTS2: a powerful robotic observatory manager

Petr Kubánek, Martin Jelínek, Stanislav Vítek, Antonio de Ugarte Postigo, Martin Nekola, John French

Proceedings Volume 6274, Advanced Software and Control for Astronomy; 62741V (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.672045
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006, Orlando, Florida , United States

Abstract

RTS2, or Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version, is an integrated package for remote telescope control under the Linux operating system. It is designed to run in fully autonomous mode, picking targets from a database table, storing image meta data to the database, processing images and storing their WCS coordinates in the database and offering Virtual-Observatory enabled access to them. It is currently running on various telescope setups world-wide. For control of devices from various manufacturers we developed an abstract device layer, enabling control of all possible combinations of mounts, CCDs, photometers, roof and cupola controllers. We describe the evolution of RTS2 from Python-based RTS to C and later C++ based RTS2, focusing on the problems we faced during development. The internal structure of RTS2, focusing on object layering, which is used to uniformly control various devices and provides uniform reporting layer, is also discussed.

Citation Download Citation

Petr Kubánek, Martin Jelínek, Stanislav Vítek, Antonio de Ugarte Postigo, Martin Nekola, and John French "RTS2: a powerful robotic observatory manager", Proc. SPIE 6274, Advanced Software and Control for Astronomy, 62741V (27 June 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.672045

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