Resumen de Design of a portable observatory control system
In this thesis, we synthesize the development of a new concept of operation of small robotic telescopes operated over the Internet. Our design includes a set of improvements in control algorithmic and hardware of several critical points of the list of subsystems necessary to obtain suitable data from a telescope.
We can synthesize the principal contributions of this thesis into five independent innovations: - An advanced drive closed-loop control: We designed an innovative hardware and software solution for controlling a telescope position at high precision and high robustness.
- A complete Telescope Control System (TCS): We implemented a light and portable software using advanced astronomical algorithms libraries for optimally compute in real-time the telescope positioning. This software also provides a new multiple simultaneous pointing models system using state machines which allows reaching higher pointing precision and longer exposure times with external guiding telescopes.
- A distributed software architecture (CoolObs): CoolObs is the implementation of a ZeroC-ICE framework allowing the control, interaction, and communication of all the peripherals present in an astronomical observatory.
- A patented system for dynamic collimation of optics: SAPACAN is a mechanical parallel arrangement and its associated software used for active compensation of low-frequency aberration variations in small telescopes.
- Collimation estimation algorithms: A sensor-less AO algorithm have been applied by the analysis of images obtained with the field camera. This algorithm can detect effects of lousy collimation. The measured misalignments can later feed corrections to a device like SAPACAN.
Due to the constant presence of new technologies in the field of astronomy, it had been one of the first fields to introduce material which was not democratized at this time such as Coupled Charged Devices, internet, adaptive optics, remote and robotic control of devices. However, every time one of these new technologies was included in the field it was necessary to design software protocol according to the epoch’s state of the art software. Then with the democratization of the same devices, years after the definition of their protocols, the same communication rules tend to be used to keep backward compatibility with old - and progressively unused- devices. When using lots of cumulated software knowledge such as with robotic observing, we can dig in several nonsenses in the commonly used architectures due to the previously explained reasons.
The described situation is the reason why we will propose as follows a new concept of considering an observatory as an entity and not a separated list of independent peripherals. We will describe the application of this concept in the field or robotic telescopes and implement it in various completely different examples to show its versatility and robustness.
First of all, we will give a short introduction of the astronomical concepts which will be used all along the document, in a second part, we will expose a state of the art of the current solutions used in the different subsystems of an observing facility and explain why they fail in being used in small telescopes. The principal section will be dedicated to detail and explain each of the five innovations enumerated previously, and finally, we will present the fabrication and integration of these solutions. We will show here how the joint use of all of them allowed obtaining satisfactory outstanding results in the robotic use of a new prototype and on the adaptation on several existing refurbished telescopes. Finally, we dedicate the last chapter of this thesis to resuming the conclusions of our work.
