IGO Publications

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Author: search.filters.author.Burse, Mahesh P.End date: 2011

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    TELICS—A Telescope Instrument Control System for Small/Medium Sized Astronomical Observatories
    (2009-10-12) SRIVASTAVA, MUDIT K.; RAMAPRAKASH, A. N.; Burse, Mahesh P.; et.al
    For any modern astronomical observatory, it is essential to have an efficient interface between the telescope and its back-end instruments. However, for small and medium-sized observatories, this requirement is often limited by tight financial constraints. Therefore a simple yet versatile and low-cost control system is required for such observatories to minimize cost and effort. Here we report the development of a modern, multipurpose instrument control system TELICS (Telescope Instrument Control System) to integrate the controls of various instruments and devices mounted on the telescope. TELICS consists of an embedded hardware unit known as a common control unit (CCU) in combination with Linux-based data acquisition and user interface. The hardware of the CCU is built around the ATmega 128 microcontroller (Atmel Corp.) and is designed with a backplane, master-slave architecture. A Qt-based graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed and the back-end application software is based on C/C++. TELICS provides feedback mechanisms that give the operator good visibility and a quick-look display of the status and modes of instruments as well as data. TELICS has been used for regular science observations since 2008 March on the 2 m, f/10 IUCAA Telescope located at Girawali in Pune, India.
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    IUCAA 2 meter telescope and its first light instrument IFOSC
    (Bull. Astr. Soc. India, 2002-06-05) Gupta, Ranjan; Burse, Mahesh P.; Das, H.K.; Kohok, A.; Ramaprakash, A.N; Engineer, S.; Tandon, S. N.
    The various features of the IUCAA 2-meter telescope, its site parameters and considerations made for preserving the local seeing in terms of ventilation, thermal emissivity of the dome etc are described. The first light back-end instrument for this telescope, i.e. Iucaa Faint Object Spectrometer and Camera (IFOSC), too is described in some detai