This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 11452 including the Title Page, Copyright information, and Table of Contents.

The TMT Software System consists of software components that interact with one another through a software infrastructure called TMT Common Software (CSW). CSW defines the types of components in the software system and their functional roles, software services for integrating components, and library code that is used by developers to create the components and subsystems that make up the TMT Software System. The unique features of CSW include the use of multiple, open-source products as the basis of the services, and an approach that works to reduce the amount of CSW-produced infrastructure code. The core of CSW is implemented on the JVM in the Scala programming language with both Java and Scala programming interfaces as well as limited access from C/C++ and Python. The source code for CSW is open source and available on GitHub. TMT CSW has recently completed its construction phase and has been delivered to the project by our India partners. This paper summarizes the technical design, construction process, construction deliverables, changes in the design during implementation, and lessons learned.

We present an overview of the Intelligent Observatory (IO) and the architecture used at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) to develop instrument and telescope control and monitoring software. The IO aims to link and coordinate the usage of the SAAO telescopes and instruments for optimal efficiency. This will entail a Central Control System (CCS) selecting appropriate instruments and telescopes and controlling observations on these. This requires interoperable instrument and telescope control software. The SAAO software architecture is flexible, allows multiple user interfaces, and supports remote control and monitoring of both telescope and instrument through a web browser. Furthermore, the architecture allows an external agent (such as the IO CCS) simultaneous control of both instruments and telescopes.

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) will transform the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope into an 11.25-m aperture telescope, dedicated to highly multiplexed, visible to near-IR spectroscopic studies with multiple spectral resolution modes. A metric of MSE’s success is survey speed, i.e. how many scientifically useful spectra MSE will obtain in support of its surveys, which requires hardware and software to be designed and perform efficiently. In this paper, we describe the front-end software, which includes proposal review, a scheduler, an exposure time calculator, and a breaker to prepare and define the survey observations, and the back-end software, which includes data reduction and science pipelines, science archive, and science platform to deliver the data back to the science community. The interfaces, the flow of data, and the overarching object model will be explained. We also discuss the tools required to support the Design Reference Survey that describes and simulates the science operations of MSE.

The Simons Observatory (SO) will be a cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment with three small-aperture telescopes and one large-aperture telescope, which will observe from the Atacama Desert in Chile. In total, SO will field over 60,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers in six spectral bands centered between 27 and 280 GHz in order to achieve the sensitivity necessary to measure or constrain numerous cosmological quantities, as outlined in The Simons Observatory Collaboration et al. (2019). To achieve these goals we have built an open-sourced platform, called OCS (Observatory Control System), which orchestrates distributed hardware systems. We provide an overview of the SO software and computer infrastructure.

The design stage of the first phase of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes has been recently completed by the SKA Organisation (SKAO). This marks the initial step towards an ambitious vision of designing, constructing, and operating telescopes with an equivalent collecting area of one square kilometre. At the completion of this design stage the project has entered a bridging period to manage work until construction funds are available. During this period many of the software teams from the design stage have been engaged in prototyping lean-agile processes, structures, and practices. By the end of the period the goal is to have pivoted from a document based, stage-gated set of processes arranged around design consortia to a code based, value-flow driven, lean-agile set of processes unified around the Scaled Agile Framework. Two years since the start of this transformation this paper reflects on these processes. We highlight some practices that have been found helpful, as well as the challenges faced. The implementation status is described, along with the main technical and cultural implications, and the preliminary results of adopting a lean-agile culture within the SKA Organisation.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build two radio interferometers in South Africa and Australia to form one Observatory monitored and controlled from the global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. The project is now approaching the end of its design phase and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. The period between the end of the design phase and the start of the construction phase, has been called bridging and, one of its main goals is to promote some CI-CD practices among the software development teams. CI-CD is an acronym that stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment. Continuous integration (CI) is the practice to merge all developers local (working) copies into the mainline very often (many times per day). Continuous delivery is the approach of developing software in short cycle ensuring that it can be released anytime and continuous deployment is the approach of delivering the software frequently and automatically. The present paper wants to analyse the decision taken by the system team (a specialized agile team devoted to developing and maintaining the tools that allows continuous practises) together with SKA architects in order to promote the CI-CD practices with TANGO controls framework.

Subaru Telescope, an 8­meter class optical telescope located in Hawaii, has been using a high ­availability commodity cluster as a platform for our Observation Control System for many years.¹ A concerted attempt to virtualize this infrastructure using conventional virtual machines² was eventually scuttled due to performance impacts on the observation software under sustained use. With the ascendance of container­-based virtualization, and its promise of high­-efficiency, we recently attempted this effort anew, and have found success with an approach that employs Linux (LXC) containers. This has provided immediate benefits in maintenance, risk ­management and availability. In this paper, we document our transition and discuss the rationale for this choice vs. the arguably more popular Docker containerization scheme. We list some of the issues we encountered and solved to realize a successful transition to containers. We have also recently converted our software stack to being based on Miniconda, a popular, open­source, cross­platform software distribution service. This move basically decoupled our software completely from the operating system platform, and provides a virtualized software stack with many desirable benefits. The combination of the LXC containers and Miniconda gives us an orthogonal three-­axis virtualization scheme with extreme flexibility. We present our system for managing Miniconda environments, the benefits that accrue, and how this three­-axis approach to virtualization has altered our deployment and management strategies.

ALMA has been operating since 2013 and it keeps on adding an ever-growing new set of capabilities. Every new feature implies among other things a new software release that has to be implemented, tested and deployed around the world. In this paper we present the new deployment process that allowed ALMA to deliver faster releases to reliable testing and production environments. This was achieved through the use of container-based services, both for applications and data. This implied that tasks that in the past were done manually, are now fully automated, in order to avoid human errors and maintain consistency between what was tested and what is finally installed in production. All this, under a unique and complex operation environment that includes the two main operation facilities in Chile at ALMA Operation Site Facilities (OSF) and Santiago Central Office (SCO), and the different executive headquarters located across the ALMA global network. We also explain how we managed to address the issue of ever-growing observational data, which made it difficult to replicate the production environment data into our testing infrastructure. Our solution consisted in using a container-based database that allowed us to create a full copy of the production database in a very short time. All those changes enabled JAO to improve its software testing process allowing a monthly release cycle.

CHEOPS, the Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite, is a Swiss-led ESA-S mission carrying out ultra-high precision photometry providing radii of transiting exoplanets. We have developed the Instrument Flight Software, which controls the instrument and processes the science data in real-time. The software implements over 100 ECSS TM/TC services and several state machines, with data processing tasks ranging from target star recognition, centroiding, on-board data reduction and compression to thermal control and FDIR. The flight hardware is based on the dual-core Leon3 processor. We present the approach that we took towards specification, design, implementation and qualification, then talk about the lessons learned especially during the commissioning.

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). Now approaching the end of its final design phase, we provide an overview of the instrument control software. The design is challenging since IRIS has interfaces with many systems at different stages of development (e.g., NFIRAOS, telescope control system, observatory sequencers), and will be built using the newly-developed TMT Common Software (CSW), which provides framework code (Java/Scala), and services (e.g., commands, telemetry). Lower-level software will be written in a combination of Java and C/C++ to communicate with hardware, such as motion controllers and infrared detectors. The overall architecture and philosophy of the IRIS software is presented, as well as a summary of the individual software components and their interactions with other systems.

Solar Orbiter is a solar mission that will approach the Sun down to a minimum perihelion of 0.28 AU and will increase its orbit inclination with respect to the ecliptic up to a maximum angle of 34 deg. For imagers aboard Solar Orbiter there will be three 10-days remote sensing windows per orbit. Observations shall be carefully planned at least 6 months in advance. The Multi Instrument Sequence Organizer (MISO) is a web based platform developed by the SPICE group and made available to support Solar Orbiter instruments teams in planning observations by assembling Mission Database sequences. Metis is the UV and visible light coronagraph aboard Solar Orbiter. Metis is a complex instrument characterized by a rich variety of observing modes, which required a careful commissioning activity and will need support for potential maintenance operations throughout the mission. In order to support commissioning and maintenance activities, the Metis team developed a PDOR (Payload Direct Operation Request) and MDOR (Memory Direct Operation Request) module integrated in MISO and made available to all Solar Orbiter instruments. An effort was made in order to interpret the coding philosophy of the main project and to make the additional module as homogeneous as possible both to the web interface and to the algorithm logic, while integrating characteristics which are peculiar to PDORs and MDORs. An user friendly web based interface allows the operator to build the operation request and to successively modify or integrate it with further or alternative information. In the present work we describe the PDOR/MDOR module for MISO by addressing its logic and main characteristics.

The construction of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is well underway, and when completed the telescope will carry out a precision photometric survey, scanning the entire sky visible from Chile every three days. The photometric performance of the survey is expected to be dominated by systematics; therefore, multiple calibration systems have been designed to measure, characterize and compensate for these effects, including a dedicated telescope and instrument to measure variations in the atmospheric transmission over the LSST bandpasses. Now undergoing commissioning, the Auxiliary Telescope system is serving as a pathfinder for the development of the Rubin Control systems. This paper presents the current commissioning status of the telescope and control software, and discusses the lessons learned which are applicable to other observatories.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a massive international undertaking with a myriad of software packages delivered by partners around the world. The Executive Software (ESW) package is the part of the TMT software system that is responsible for providing unified high-level control of observatory operations. It consists of five parts: a) a Sequencer Component that can be tailored to various sequencing needs by the loading of custom “scripts”, written in a TMT sequencing Domain Specific Language (DSL); b) a collection of these sequencing scripts used for critical observing tasks such as acquisition; c) user interface (UI) infrastructure that provides browser-based UI standards and access to TMT components and services; d) the set of UIs that observatory staff will use during operations to conduct TMT activities such as observing; and e) tools that assist in the visualization of observation data for quality assurance. In this paper, we describe the design of ESW, and give an update on the current status of the package, which is currently under construction.

The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) with a collecting area of 4pi square meters will be the largest fully robotic telescope in the world. This contribution is focused on the design of the telescope control system, summarizing the state of the art and proposing a software architecture and a development roadmap that reflects the needs and requirements for this facility. This pioneering effort for a large robotic telescope aims also to provide standards for future similar facilities.

The BMK10k is a 30cm-aperture lens telescope ‘Ballistische Messkammer 75/2,5/18’, now equipped with a 100Megapixel STA1600LN CCD camera. With a plate scale of 2.54 arcsec per pixel, it delivers an astrometrically well-corrected field of view of 7.25° × 7.25°. We have roboticized it with the intention of operating it from Cerro Armazones, Chile, where it saw first light in August 2019. It is currently in commissioning. Among other applications, we plan to use it to observe the Southern PLATO Field (SPF) almost continuously for three years in preparation for the PLATO satellite, which will have much reduced spatial resolution in comparison. The telescope mount was retrofitted with modern servo motors and an industrial Beckhoff programmable logic controller (PLC), allowing reliable remote telescope control, environmental monitoring, dome control, with a separate PLC ensuring safely measures to protect the telescope in case of communication loss or power failure. Communications between the TCS and the PLC firmware are accomplished with Beckhoff TwinCAT Automation Device Specification (ADS) over TCP/IP. Real-time response is realised within the PLC, and ADS has latency times on the order of a few 100 ms, sufficient for high-level control of the telescope. Using off-the-shelf industrial components has proven to be a cost-effective and reliable method of operating a fully autonomous observatory.

In the field of radio astronomy, the 21cm absorption line of HI is an important way to explore the large-scale structure and evolution history of the universe. The working frequency of FAST's 19 beam receiver is 1.05GHz to 1.45GHz, and the main observation object is to conduct an accurate and rapid intensity mapping survey of extragalactic HI’s signal. Aiming at the 21cm spectral line of the object, we designed a parallel data processing platform to mitigate the influence of foreground, instrument, radio frequency, standing wave and other noises on the spectral data, then generate the image data of the whole sky region. At present, we divide the process into flux calibration, bandpass and baseline correction, radio frequency interference marking and data gridding work, etc. The whole project was programmed in Python, and Cython was used for some projects to speed things up.

Development of engineering user interfaces for a radiotelescope can greatly benefit from a Lean UX approach. In this paper we analyse the situation for the SKA project, a very large endeavour that involves dozens of agile teams, hundreds of developers and many more stakeholders, for a system whose lifespan will be several decades. The paper describes how we are establishing a Lean UX process appropriate for the current stage of the SKA project. We outline the four major challenges that need to be overcome, and that constitute our starting point for defining the overall goals characterizing the desirable process. On this basis, we present the adoption plan. The Lean UX process we envision is suitable for developing software for a very complex social and technical collaboration such as SKA where software is being developed with a quite sophisticated agile framework. Similar decisions are likely to be made on many large scientific projects that are developed with agile methods.

The Cryogenic Near Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) data processing pipeline has been created to process the live data stream whilst on summit and supports the extensive variety of operational modes that the Cryo-NIRSP accommodates. It performs data processing, data storage, and the displaying of quality assurance measures. This includes tasks such as the derivation of calibration parameters, saving of master frames, data reduction, and demodulation. Significant work has also gone into the quality assurance aspect, which publishes the outputs to a display in real time for on-the-spot data verification. This provides the final element to the end-to-end running of the Cryo-NIRSP.

GRBSpec and GRBPhot are two databases designed for the storage and analysis of gamma-ray burst (GRB) data. GRBSpec is devoted to spectroscopic observations, GRBPhot to photometric data. Both databases have a detailed search engine and offer online graphical tools for plotting and data analysis. They aim to publicly share these specialised data among the astronomical community and provide quick online measurements and plots. The databases can be accessed through http://grbpsec.iaa.es and http://grbphot.iaa.es, respectively. As of November 2020, the database already contained 2013 files belonging to 810 spectra of 268 different GRBs.

Modern telescope control systems control a multitude of sensors and actuators physically distributed across subsystems. Traditionally, control systems are specified to compute system outputs based on reference set-points despite environmental or internal disturbances. In a goal oriented approach, the control system architecture emphasizes the operational aspect, specifying the behavior at a higher level in terms of operational goals, considering several aspects such as environmental conditions and required wavefront quality. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a goal oriented approach by analyzing four fundamental functions: pointing, tracking, offsetting, and dome vignetting. The resulting SysML analysis and design models are used to develop a software prototype for distributed telescope control. Typical operational scenarios are discussed and compared to the ESO Very Large Telescope control software architecture.

CHARIS is an IFS designed for imaging and spectroscopy of disks and sub-stellar companions. To improve ease of use and efficiency of science production, we present progress on a fully-automated backend for CHARIS. This Automated Data Extraction, Processing, and Tracking System (ADEPTS) will log data files from CHARIS in a searchable database and perform all calibration and data extraction, yielding science-grade data cubes. The extracted data will also be run through a preset array of post-processing routines. With significant parallelization of data processing, ADEPTS will dramatically reduce the time between data acquisition and the availability of science-grade data products.

The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey was selected as M4 mission in the ESA Cosmic Vision programme. This mission will study the chemical composition of exoplanetary atmospheres via high resolution, multi-wavelength spectroscopy with high photometric precision. These tasks demand highly stable pointing during operation, which is provided by a dedicated Fine Guiding Sensor (FGS). The FGS uses two MCT detectors operating in 0.6-1.95μm range. The instrument provides target identification and centroid measurements to the spacecraft forming a closed loop in the guiding. In addition, the FGS detectors are also used for science including photometric and spectral windows. Our instrument contains it own Data Processing Unit (DPU). This is a dual core LEON-based computer running the Instrument Application Software (IASW). The software implements a large number of ECSS services to fulfill the various operating needs. The mission-specific modes cover target acquisition and tracking tasks, processing of the photometric and spectral windows as well as various calibration modes. Aside from that, the thermal control is also handled by the FGS software. The science data need to be compressed in a lossless manner. In this respect we build upon our experiences gathered in our contributions to the ESA missions Herschel and Cheops. While the science data processing has only soft real-timing needs, the centroiding is critical to run and provide results as fast as possible. We present the architectural design of the software particularly highlighting the low-level software adaptations needed to support the high demands from the centroid timing. The presented overview will cover the current development status of the IASW with a detailed look at the design and expected performance of the algorithms. Furthermore, we will present our development and testing workflow, which is built upon our own EGSE software.

Xenomai1 is a hard real-time operating system suitable for many low-latency tasks encountered in astronomical instruments. It is open source, has microsecond-level response time and coexists with the Linux kernel, thereby facilitating the execution of hard real time code on Linux systems. This presentation presents experience coding systems with Xenomai for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer. Firstly an overview of Xenomai is given, focusing on how it achieves hard real time performance and how it can be used to interact with hardware using Linux-like device drivers. Secondly, a generic outline of the development process is given, including the mindset needed, general pitfalls to be avoided, and strategies that can be employed depending on how open the hardware and any existing source code is. Two specific case studies from the Magdalena Ridge Observatory are then presented: Firstly, the fast tip-tilt system, which must read out a 32x32 subframe from an EMCCD camera, determine a stellar image centroid and send a correction voltage to a tip-tilt mirror at up to 1kHz. Secondly, the MROI delay line metrology system, which must read laser metrology position data for ten delay line trolleys and send correction voltages to their cat’s eyes at 5kHz. Finally, some future challenges to development with Xenomai and other hard real time operating systems are discussed: processors with functionality such as system management interrupts that are beyond operating system control, and the trend towards buffered or closed interfaces between computers and hardware.

Several large telescopes with light weighted honeycomb mirrors have been commissioned in the last few decades. The control software for a honeycomb mirror is generally implemented by directly referring to legacy source code of previous generation telescopes. This approach can hinder clear development and improvement of control software for future telescopes with honeycomb mirrors. Hence in this paper the core software functionalities for the control of the honeycomb mirror are presented. We provide motivation for these functionalities which then leads to improvement of some of the core software control routines. We give a detailed description of support system software. For the thermal control system, an overview is provided for some key software functions. The description is independent of the software development process and environment imposed by a particular observatory. Hence, the software description provided in this paper can be used for software development of any honeycomb mirror control system.

IRIS (Infrared Imaging Spectrograph) is the near-infrared (0.84 to 2.4 micron) diffraction-limited imager and Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) designed for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Narrow-Field Infrared Adaptive Optics System ( NFIRAOS ). The imager will have a 34 arcsec x 34 arcsec field of view with 4 milliarcseconds (mas) pixels. The IFS consists of a lenslet array and slicer, enabling four plate scales from 4 mas to 50 mas, with multiple gratings and filters. We will report the progress on the development of the IRIS Data Reduction System ( DRS ) in the final design phase. The IRIS DRS is being developed in Python with the software architecture based on the James Webb Space Telescope science calibration pipeline. We are developing a library of algorithms as individual Python classes that can be configured independently and bundled into pipelines. We will interface this with the observatory software to run online during observations and we will release the package publicly for scientists to develop custom analyses. It also includes a C library for readout processing to be used for both in real-time processing (e.g., up-the-ramp, MCDS) as well the ability for astronomers to use for offline reduction. Lastly, we will also discuss the development of the IRIS simulation packages that simulate raw spectra and image readout-data from the Hawaii-4RG detectors, which helps in developing reduction algorithms during this design phase.

We present a fully-automated CCD testbench. The system performs all the tests in about 12 hours, and when done reduces the data, grading the device and presenting the results in the form of both a pdf report and web-based tables . All the data goes automatically to a database where both the raw and processed data can be visualized and compared with other devices, allowing for detector statistical graphs (number of devices over certain threshold in any given parameter, etc). The testbench was developed in the context of a FermiLab and CTIO collaboration for the packaging and characterization of the red and NIR science ccds for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), where over 40 devices were tested. The system was further expanded at CTIO to be used with any ccd or detector controller. The characterization includes non-linearity (high and low), full well, flats and darks cosmetics (hot and dark pixels, bad columns,etc), dark current, noise, CTE, absolute QE and lateral diffusion.

Each of the seven primary mirror cell in the GMT contains over 225 EtherCAT slaves in the cell, leading to a nightmare of cabling. Optimization of the initial construction and ongoing maintenance of the cells requires reduced complexity of wiring in the cell. Employing the concept of Power over EtherCAT and a star configuration, the resulting the EtherCAT Power and Communications Hub design reduces the wiring in the cell by 2/3, while additionally providing centralized power management and diagnosis of each actuator communications link. The design consists of an EtherCAT slave to allow the central control system to monitor and control the slaves attached to the hub, and power control circuits to provide and monitor power to each slave. In addition to providing a significant reduction in wiring complexity, the hub serves as an additional control point for power to each support actuator, enhancing mirror safety through redundant control of the actuators. This paper describes the motivation driving the requirements, the resulting requirements and design, and test results of the prototype EtherCAT and Power Hubs.

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an array of polarization-sensitive millimeter wave telescopes that observes ∼ 70% of the sky at frequency bands centered near 40 GHz, 90 GHz, 150 GHz, and 220 GHz from the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Here, we describe the architecture of the software used to control the telescopes, acquire data from the various instruments, schedule observations, monitor the status of the instruments and observations, create archival data packages, and transfer data packages to North America for analysis. The computer and network architecture of the CLASS observing site is also briefly discussed. This software and architecture has been in use since 2016, operating the telescopes day and night throughout the year, and has proven successful in fulfilling its design goals.

In the last ten years the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) Instrumentation Framework has begun moving its low level interface to instrument functions away from VME-based Local Control Units (LCU's) to Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components connected with industry standard fieldbuses. This move has resulted in the adoption of PC-based Programmable Logical Controllers (PLC's) that directly control the instrument devices, connected via Ethernet to Linux workstations that provide high level coordination and user-interfaces. To enable this shift to COTS components, a new "fieldbus-aware" Instrument Control System Base (IC0FB) was developed which utilizes, among others, the Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard for communication between the workstations and the PLC's. The initial implementation of IC0FB used closed source libraries for this OPC-UA-based communication, however, licensing restrictions made compiling and distributing difficult throughout the VLT project. This has prompted the recent re-implementation of the OPC UA IC0FB Communication Interface using the open source library open62541¹ and the adoption of open62541 for ESO's new Extreme Large Telescope. In this paper, we discuss the lessons learned in moving to open source implementation of an industry standard. We compare the performance of the open62541 implementation and the implementation based on the commercially licensed Softing Automation SDK² and show that the performance of the open source solution is comparable to the closed source implementation.

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. The GOTO Telescope Control System (G-TeCS) is a custom robotic control system written to control all aspects of GOTO’s nightly operations completely autonomously. The core of the system are the hardware control daemons, which each operate a class of hardware (dome, mount, cameras etc.). Other daemon programs monitor the on-site weather conditions, listen to incoming transient alerts, and decide which target the system should be observing. These daemons are supervised and monitored by the “pilot” master control program, which supervises observatory observations and also identifies and attempts to fix any issues that arise during the night. Observations are decided by the scheduler, which instructs the pilot what to observe using a “just-in-time” system. We present an update on work carried out on the GOTO Telescope Control System since the initial commissioning of the prototype instrument on La Palma. Efforts have been focused on developing the alert processing and scheduling systems, which allow GOTO to receive and process transient alerts, then schedule and carry out observations all without the need for human involvement. Under normal conditions GOTO will observe an all-sky survey, but when a gravitational-wave or other transient alert is received target pointings are automatically calculated by mapping the localisation region onto the survey grid. The scheduler then determines which target is the highest priority to observe, based on a variety of parameters which are set depending on a pre-defined follow-up strategy for the class of alert. A second GOTO mount is due to be constructed on La Palma in 2020. This mount will operate as an independent instrument with its own pilot, but a single scheduling system for both mounts will determine the optimal target for each. Having two independent mounts will enable more advanced follow-up scheduling opportunities, which the control system will need to determine for each incoming alert. As well a second mount on La Palma, a southern GOTO node with two additional mounts is planned to be constructed in Australia. When complete both sites will be linked to form a single multi-site observatory, requiring more advanced scheduling systems to best optimise survey and follow-up observations. GOTO is operated at the La Palma observing facilities of the University of Warwick on behalf of a consortium including the University of Warwick, Monash University, Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, the University of Leicester, the University of Sheffield, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT), the University of Turku, the University of Portsmouth and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

We describe the latest development of the control and monitoring system of the Greenland Telescope (GLT). The GLT is a 12-m radio telescope aiming to carry out the sub-millimeter Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA), to image the shadows of super massive black holes. The telescope is currently located at the Thule Air Base for commissioning before deployed to the Summit Station. The GLT participated in the VLBI observing campaigns in 2018 and 2019 and fringes were successfully detected at 86 and 230 GHz. Our antenna control software was adapted from the Submillimeter Array (SMA), and as a result for single-dish observations we added new routines to coordinate it with other instruments. We are exploring new communication interfaces; we utilized both in-memory and on-disk databases to be part of the interfaces not only for hardware monitoring but also for engineering event logging. We plan to incorporate the system of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope for the full Linux-based receiver control. The current progress of integrating our receivers, spectrometers, sub-reflector, and continuum detector into control is presented, together with the implementation of the commissioning software for spectral line pointing. We also describe how we built the anti-collision protection and the recovery mechanism for the sub-reflector hexapod.

The System for coronagraphy with High Order adaptive optics in Z and H band (SHARK-NIR), 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 extreme adaptive optics offered by LBT. In this paper we describe the implementation of SHINS, the SHARK-NIR instrument control software. We chose to use frameworks and components already developed and tested on other instruments at LBT, such as LINC-NIRVANA and ARGOS; this allowed us to minimize the development while employing software already considered robust. This approach required some effort in order to integrate eterogenous systems, as the motion control and the scientific detector subsystems, in a single control system. Indeed, SHINS is based on the extensive use of TwiceAsNice framework from MPIA in Heidelberg; we explain how we employed it in the implementation of components responsible for controlling the motion functions, as well as how we adapted some TwiceAsNice libraries realized for other instruments at LBT, to implement subsystems not related to motion functions. On the other hand, the scientific camera is controlled using INDI, a protocol developed and used at LBT. We tied TwiceAsNice framework and INDI employing ZeroC-ICE framework, used to implement the central component of the instrument control software. In the paper we also describe the implementation of the sequencer component responsible for receiving from the LBT observation preparation tool information on the observation block to be executed, and translating them into a list of operations to be communicated to the central component of the instrument control software. We describe also the implementation with Qt language of graphical user interfaces, at present employed during integration of the instrument in Padova.

Astrocook is a software environment to analyze quasar spectra in a variety of ways. It aims to break the static pipeline paradigm by enforcing a new flexible approach to data treatment, in which complex automatic workflows are dynamically created from a wide set of atomic operations (hence the tagline: “a thousand recipes to cook a spectrum”). We will focus both on the novel algorithms that have been implemented and on the scientific validation and reproducibility of the results. To highlight the benefits of the Astrocook approach for both interactive and automatic analysis, two specific use cases are discussed (one of which was used in practice to process observational data from the QUBRICS survey).

We present an overview of the design and implementation of the real-time speckle image processing pipeline for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) first light instrument. We begin by discussing our real-time constraints, changes to our design over the course of development and the current design and status of the project. We then present a more detailed overview of the C++ pipeline implementation including major components, functionality and usage. Finally, we present a performance summary and a reconstruction obtained from DKIST first light initiative data.

ScopeSim is a flexible multipurpose instrument data simulation framework built in Python. It enables both raw and reduced observation data to be simulated for a wide range of telescopes and instruments quickly and efficiently on a personal computer. The software is currently being used to generate simulated raw input data for developing the data reduction pipelines for the MICADO and METIS instruments at the ELT. The ScopeSim environment consists of three main packages which are responsible for providing on-sky target templates (ScopeSim_templates), the data to build the optical models of various telescopes and instruments (instrument reference database), and the simulation engine (ScopeSim). This strict division of responsibilities allows ScopeSim to be used to simulate observation data for many different instrument and telescope configurations for both imaging and spectroscopic instruments. ScopeSim has been built to avoid redundant calculations where ever possible. As such it is able to deliver simulated observations on time scales of seconds to minutes. All the code and data is open source and hosted on Github. The community is also most welcome, and indeed encouraged to contribute to code ideas, target templates, and instrument packages.

Instrument control and data handling are critical aspects of every space mission, taken care of by flight software. We are implementing the instrument application software (IASW) for the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI), one of four science instruments onboard the SMILE satellite - an ESA/CAS mission currently in development with the goal to study the interface between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. Our IASW runs on the digital processing unit of the instrument and can be essentially divided into three components. While the basic SW as the low-level layer comprises the operating system and drivers (e.g., for the SpaceWire connectors), the application SW provides all high-level services for the instrument, and the data pool facilitates visibility and control over the software. The main functions of the IASW include commanding of the detector front-end electronics and operation of the radiation shutter electronics, telemetry data compression, housekeeping management and storage, as well as maintenance of general instrument health. Furthermore, the software shall be able to perform (to some extent autonomous) fault detection, isolation and recovery. The IASW is mode driven, i.e. it operates several state machines and provides algorithms and procedures to maintain instrument operation. These parts are implemented via the CORDET framework. Our software development follows a test-driven design - we have therefore also created a suite of tools that facilitate interaction with flight software, speed up the process of test generation and verification, and provide a modular environment comprising actual hardware and simulator components.

The Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON) is a collection of ground-based automated telescopes observing oscillations of the Sun. The network has been operating since the early 1990s. We present development work on a prototype next generation observation platform, BiSON:NG, based almost entirely on inexpensive offthe-shelf components, and where the footprint is reduced to a size that can be inexpensively installed on the roof of an existing building. Continuous development is essential in ensuring that automated networks such as BiSON are well placed to observe the next solar cycle and beyond.

We develop a machine learning (ML) software to estimate morphological parameters (e.g., the half-light radius r_e) of high redshift galaxies in the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam data. To make the ML software capture simultaneously galaxy morphological features and point spread function (PSF) broadening effects, we implement a two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) for inputs of galaxy and PSF images. Thanks to large training samples of galaxy and PSF images, the two-stream CNN estimates re more accurately than a single-stream CNN with only galaxy images. Our ML software would be a useful tool to investigate galaxy morphological properties with PSF-unstable images obtained in future large-area ground-based surveys.

We describe the camera articulation prototype (CAP) for the Giant Magellan Telescope Multi-object Astronomical and Cosmological Spectrograph (GMACS), which is a wide field, multi-object, moderate-resolution, optical spectrograph of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The GMACS will have the Camera and Grating Articulation System (CGAS) which has two independent cameras and grating modules. The grating angles and the camera angles can be changed to adjust the dispersed light bands on the detector. The electronics components of this system include motors with encoder, pneumatic brakes, and limit switches. We demonstrate how to control the camera angles using a prototype that is designed for the camera articulation controller as a miniature model of the GMACS. The prototype was built with commercially-available extruded aluminum struts and 3D-printed parts and includes two motors with encoders. The prototype was produced quickly and inexpensively, but replicates all functions of the camera articulation mechanism in GMACS. We have developed the control package for the prototype that will be one of the GMACS Device Control System (DCS). The software is designed by the Agile development process and SysML, and developed using Visual C++ on Windows OS. This software has five major control functions: power, homing, resolution mode changing, limit detection, and emergency process. The limit detection is implemented by setting up the limit angle range in the software, because the limit switches are not included in the prototype. We present the demonstration result and discuss the details of the communication route about data flow between high-end user software and hardware components.

The forthcoming SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) will be a new spectroscopic facility for the ESO New Technology Telescope in La Silla, focused on transient events and able to cover both the UV-VIS and NIR bands. The instrument passed the Final Design Review in 2018 and is currently in manufacturing and integration phase. This paper is focused on the assembly and testing of the instrument control electronics, which will manage all the motorized functions, alarms, sensors, and electric interlocks. The electronics is hosted in two main control cabinets, divided in several subracks that are assembled to ensure easy accessibility and transportability, to simplify test, integration and maintenance. Both racks are equipped with independent power supply distribution and have their own integrated cooling systems. This paper shows the assembly strategy, reports on the development status and describes the tests performed to verify the system before the integration into the whole instrument.

Database technology has been developing to exploit the next-generation hardware in the era of big data processing. At the same time, astronomical data size has been steadily increasing, and astronomical source catalogs obtained from largescale surveys with a wide-field camera, such as Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), are a good test bench for evaluating the new database technology with a large data set. Such archive systems often employ a highly versatile relational database management system (RDBMS), but reducing the time required for data transaction and complex analysis has come to an important challenge. To tackle this difficulty, we aim to develop astronomical applications with a new catalog database using a next-generation RDBMS technology, where the query engine is designed to efficiently use computing infrastructures for processing big data. Demonstrations with science applications are essential to evaluate the new database. We verify query performance with the current HSC source catalog. For application to huge astronomical catalog databases, we are pursuing and verifying the capabilities of new database technologies. It will, in turn, enable fast ad hoc search and efficient detection of a wide range of variable events with the technology. Our pilot tests using typical astronomical queries on a cluster system shows significant improvements in response times with the aid of distributed query engines. We report performance of the test database for typical astronomical queries, and discuss optimizing the schema based on query workloads.

Spectral energy distribution (SED) camera for QUasars in EArly uNiverse (SQUEAN) has been developed and operated at the 2.1 m Otto Struve Telescope in the McDonald Observatory, US, since 2015 February. SQUEAN can have up to 20 medium band filters to measure SEDs of high redshift quasar candidates (z >5), gamma ray bursts, supernova, asteroids, etc. In the development process of the SQUEAN control software, we applied the spiral model, in which the software evolves by the repetition of every systemic process. The SQUEAN control software consists of the SQUEAN Main Observation Package (SMOP), the Kyung Hee University (KHU) Filter wheel Control Package for the McDonald Observatory 82 inch (or 2.1 m) telescope (KFC82), and the KHU Autoguiding Package (KAP82). The SMOP takes science data with various readout modes such as open shutter mode, semi-auto-focus mode, and script mode. The KFC82 controls the filter wheel with medium bands by network communications through the SMOP. The KAP82 monitors a reference star and auto-guides the telescope during observations.

Large volumes of monitoring and logging data result from the operation of a large scale astrophysical observatory. In the last few years several “Big Data” technologies have been developed to deal with such volumes of data especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) framework. We present the logging, monitoring and alarm system architecture for the ASTRI Mini-Array aimed at supporting the analysis of scientific data and improving the operational activities of the telescope facility . A prototype was designed and built considering the latest software tools and concepts coming from Big Data and IoT and a particular relevance has been given in satisfying quality requirements such as performance, scalability and availability.

The MOONS instrument is a new Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) . The instrument design aims to deploy nearly 1000 fibers over the field of view requiring to control nearly 2000 actuators by the same number of CAN bus stepper motor drives through 15 independent CAN bus networks. All this massive traffic and extensive wiring can be merged down into a single Ethernet line by means of 3 Ethernet to Multi-CAN Gateways (EtherCAN) and an Ethernet switch. This is possible today due to emerging multi-CAN ARM microcontrollers, which provide highly embedded solutions suited to be located closer to the sensitive areas of the instrument, where power dissipation and space are critical.

The Son-Of-X-shooter (SOXS) is a dual arm spectrograph (UV-VIS and NIR) and Acquisition Camera (AC) due to mounted on the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6m New Technology Telescope (NTT) in La Silla. Designed to simultaneously cover the optical and NIR wavelength range from 350-2050 nm, the instrument will be dedicated to the study of transient and variable events with many Target of Opportunity requests expected. The goal of the SOXS Data Reduction pipeline is to use calibration data to remove all instrument signatures from the SOXS scientific data frames for each of the supported instrument modes, convert this data into physical units and deliver them with their associated error bars to the ESO Science Archive Facility (SAF) as Phase 3 compliant science data products, all within 30 minutes. The primary reduced product will be a detrended, wavelength and flux calibrated, telluric corrected 1D spectrum with UV-VIS + NIR arms stitched together. The pipeline will also generate Quality Control (QC) metrics to monitor telescope, instrument and detector health. The pipeline is written in Python 3 and has been built with an agile development philosophy that includes adaptive planning and evolutionary development. The pipeline is to be used by the SOXS consortium and the general user community that may want to perform tailored processing of SOXS data. Test driven development has been used throughout the build using ‘extreme’ mock data. We aim for the pipeline to be easy to install and extensively and clearly documented.

Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), featuring a 10,4 meters segmented primary mirror, is nowadays the largest optical and infra-red telescope in operation since it started its scientific production in 2009. GTC operation is enabled by the GTC Control System (GCS), a large, complex, real-time distributed system, which coordinates manifold hardware and software components. A custom script-based toolchain was written to support developing and building software components for GCS, and it’s also responsible for packaging new releases and development kits for instrument builders as a whole. Thus, continuous integration process is heavy and release deployments are cumbersome. In order to break such allocation monolith, an initiative is under way to rethink GCS building and deployment procedures to use more modern, commonly available and extensible tools. Using tools as CMake, Conan and rpm it’s possible to leverage existing components and their dependencies in building and deployment time, so component tailored deployments will be possible. This modular approach to build and deploy GCS will reduce release cycle times and invested effort. Finally, taking advantage of this proven control system for new telescopes makes sense, as several common high level telescope operations work pretty much the same. As a project’s positive side effect, new telescopes could take the GCS components useful for them and just develop new components for specific elements not found at GTC (e.g.: instruments, actuators, . . . ), and even contribute improvements beneficial to all parties. This paper reports on the current status of the project, challenges found, decisions made, milestones reached and future steps.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) is a 10.4-meter optical-infrared telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, Spain. Like any modern telescope, it has a high degree of automation and complexity, being made up of hundreds of subsystems that work in a coordinated way to carry out a scientific observation. Even the control system is at a good level of maturity, on certain occasions, when an unwanted event occurs, it sometimes becomes difficult to identify its cause and thus restore the system to its nominal state efficiently. There are three pillars that can be worked on to reduce the time lost due to technical failures: reduce the frequency of occurrence, reduce the impact after the occurrence or increase the detection capacity. However, the system will never be fault-free, so it will always be necessary to develop a system that allows a diagnosis to be made. Ideally, the diagnosis should be made with the information provided by the control system itself and other services that verify the status of the platform, and therefore, with minimal interaction with the user. On the other hand, due to the great variety of faults, and the need to carry out the diagnosis as soon as possible, a voice user interface will be used, in such a way that the operator can indicate the fault that is occurring, using natural language. As a proof of concept, a subsystem diagnostic service has been developed, a thermal monitoring subsystem, a service in charge of providing thermal values of the telescope structure to build a thermal model. During the implementation of this diagnostic service, the need for changes in the software design has already been identified to include the information necessary to generate a good diagnosis, which will indicate to the operator: which part is failing, where it is located and the instruction to replace it. Consequently, it has been proven that extending it to the rest of the control system will bring immediate benefits.

In this paper, we describe the preliminary architecture of the Software for the Instrument Control System (ICSS) of MAVIS, the new MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph for ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The instrument successfully passed its phase A in May 2020 and will start phase B in March 2021. ICSS is in charge of controlling all the motorized functions, managing the scientific exposures, monitoring the status of the system and coordinating the sequence of operations from the Observing Blocks receiving to the collection of the scientific data. A challenge from the SW point of view is that MAVIS, besides being an instrument for VLT, will use the ELT-SW framework, which is currently under development. A dedicated ELT/VLT gateway will provide the interfaces with the Observation Handling Subsystem (OHS), the Archive System, the Telescope Control System (TCS) and the AOF.

Recently, the amount of data obtained from astronomical instruments has been increasing explosively, and data science methods such as Machine Learning/Deep Learning gain attention on the back of the growth in demand for automatic analysis. Using these methods, the number of applications to the target sources that have clear boundaries with the background i.e., stars, planets, and galaxies is increasing year by year. However, there are a few studies which applied the data science methods to the interstellar medium (ISM) distributed in the Galactic plane, which have complicated and ambiguous silhouettes. We aim to develop classifiers to automatically extract various structures of the ISM by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that is strong in image recognition even in deep learning. In this study, we focus on the infra-red (IR) ring structures distributed in the Galactic plane. Based on the catalog of Churchwell et al. (2006, 2007), we created a “Ring” dataset from the Spitzer/GLIMPSE 8 μm and Spitzer/MIPSGAL 24 μm data and optimized the parameters of the CNN model. We applied the developed model to a range of 16.5° ≤ l ≤ 19.5°, |b| ≤ 1° . As a result, 234 “Ring” candidates are detected. The “Ring” candidates were matched with 75% Milky Way Project (MWP, Simpson et al. 2012) “Ring” and 65% WISE Hii region catalog (Anderson et al. 2014). In addition, new“Ring”and Hii region candidate objects were also found. For these results, we conclude that the CNN model may have a recognition accuracy equal to or better than that of human eyes.

MICADO, the near-infrared Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations and ELT first light instrument, shall be operated as a client of the AO system MAORY and offer capabilities for different imaging modes and spectroscopy. Its control software is being developed on the basis of a customizable ESO framework while taking into account the separation of the system MICADO-MAORY into independent software entities as well as shared functionality with an instrument-specific observation preparation tool. We present a MICADO-centered perspective of the envisaged top-level architecture.

Las Cumbres Observatory (LCOGT) has recently finished integrating the SOAR 4.1-meter telescope into its robotic telescope network. To achieve this, an observation request language was developed suitable for describing observations across a wide range of current and future telescope facilities and observing resources. A complete set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) were developed to allow any arbitrary observatory to utilize LCOGT’s observation management software, including interfaces to i) manage proposals, ii) retrieve and update a schedule of observations, iii) report the progress of ongoing observations, iv) propagate operational telemetry and v) receive science products. We describe our efforts, the experience gained, and the implications of this work on the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON) initiative. We also introduce an alternate option for observation management in the open source Observatory Control System (OCS).

TolTEC is a new camera that will shortly be mounted on the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT). It provides simultaneous, polarization-sensitive imaging at wavelengths of 1.1, 1.4 and 2.0 mm through its 7718 Lumped element Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs). The TolTEC data analysis software stack, TolTECA, has been developed to facilitate the data analysis tasks, producing science-ready data products for both the TolTEC legacy surveys and for future principal investigator projects. The software stack consists of a high performance fully parallelized C++ data reduction pipeline engine citlali, and an infrastructural Python package tolteca, which works at the highest level, with many notable features including data product management, a web-based data visualization framework, timely analysis and quick-look tools for on-site observing, and a TolTEC observation simulator.

Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) and the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) are home to several telescopes, ranging from 4.2 to 0.9 meters in diameter. Every telescope has one or more working instruments, which are used every night of the year; keeping this vast amount of instruments (which includes a very big multi-ccd focal plane as well as visible and near infrared imagers and spectrographs) functioning in a way that ensures an appropriate science quality on each one of them is not a minor challenge. In order to help with this task we have developed an observatory-wide Detector and Instrument Quality Control system, which consist on a set of centralized tools: real time telemetry for all the instruments, automatic detector quality performance assessment, electronic logbooks, instrument software logging, image visualization, etc. All the data goes to databases and is available via web browsers.

SOXS (Son Of X-Shooter) is a forthcoming instrument for ESO-NTT, mainly dedicated to the spectroscopic study of transient events and is currently starting the AIT (Assembly, Integration, and Test) phase. It foresees a visible spectrograph, a near-Infrared (NIR) spectrograph, and an acquisition camera for light imaging and secondary guiding. The optimal setup and the monitoring of SOXS are carried out with a set of software-controlled motorized components and sensors. The instrument control software (INS) also manages the observation and calibration procedures, as well as maintenance and self-test operations. The architecture of INS, based on the latest release of the VLT Software (VLT2019), has been frozen; the code development is in an advanced state for what concerns supported components and observation procedures, which run in simulation. In this proceeding we present the INS current status, focusing in particular on the ongoing efforts in the support of two non-standard, “special” devices. The first special device is the piezoelectric slit exchanger for the NIR spectrograph; the second special device is the piezoelectric tip-tilt corrector used for active compensation of mechanical flexures of the instrument. For both, which are commanded via a serial line, specific driver and simulators have been implemented.

The Subaru Telescope recently celebrated its 20th year of operation. Despite that lengthy period of successful operation, it has never had a proper simulator for its telescope control system. This fact complicates the development and testing of observing scripts that need to send commands and receive realistic feedback from both telescope and instrument systems. The Subaru telescope control system was developed by a subcontractor and there was no requirement for it to be able to run in simulation mode. Furthermore, the source code is proprietary and is not accessible by current Subaru software engineers. These two facts greatly complicated the development of a telescope simulator. Prior to the current effort, the telescope simulator consisted of a “yes-man” interface, i.e., the rudimentary simulator would just respond that it received the command but would not simulate telescope motion or set any status items to provide feedback to the observing scripts. The telescope simulator developed in this effort currently simulates the following components: telescope and instrument rotator motion, focal station configuration, autoguide camera images and pointing errors, as well as facility hardware like dome shutters and mirror covers. We have plans to further refine all those components and implement features like simulated environmental conditions based on historical weather data. The simulator has already proven useful in testing observation scripts. In addition, the simulator will also be a good training aid for new telescope operators.

HARMONI is the first light visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph for the ELT. It covers a large spectral range from 450nm to 2450nm with resolving powers from R (≡λ/Δλ) 3500 to 18000 and spatial sampling from 60mas to 4mas. It can operate in two Adaptive Optics modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or with NOAO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews. HARMONI slices the input light beam in subfields and then into slitlets and rearranges them to obtain spectra on its detectors. The Data Reduction software (DRS) handles calibration and scientific raw data from HARMONI and computes a fully reduced and calibrated science data cube. The challenge is to develop robust methods suitable for each of the 44 scale/band combinations of HARMONI. The geometrical calibration, one of the steps of the DRS, determines the coordinate transformation from detector pixels to wavelength and relative spatial position in the input focal plane. This paper provides a mathematical description of the algorithms involved in the geometrical calibration and presents validations on mock data simulated with the HARMONI Instrument Numerical Model (HINM). Briefly, to cope with a possible overlap of slitlets, we locate the slitlets using a global fitting method on flat-field exposures. The wavelength solution is computed using arc exposures. To compute the geometrical transformation we choose to use specific masks illuminated with a white continuum lamp. A trace mask exposure provides the transformation along the slitlets. A pinhole mask exposure determines the transformation in the perpendicular direction by fitting the flux within each slitlet.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to create a federated environment for hosting and processing research data, supporting science in all disciplines without geographical boundaries, so that data, software, methods and publications can be shared seamlessly as part of an Open Science community. This work presents the ongoing activities related to the implementation and integration into EOSC of Visual Analytics services for astrophysics, specifically addressing challenges related to data management, mapping and structure detection. These services provide visualisation capabilities to manage the data life cycle processes under FAIR principles, integrating data processing for imaging and multidimensional map creation and mosaicking and data analysis supported with machine learning techniques, for detection of structures in large scale multidimensional maps.

EPICS (experimental physics and industrial control system) is an open source, cross platform, distributed real-time control framework, which is widely used to control devices such as particle accelerators, large-scale experiments, large telescopes and other large-scale experiments. In the telescope control system, it is necessary to meet the real-time and distributed control requirements. For the distributed telescope observation and control system RACS2 (Remote Autonomous Control System), it can be divided into three layers: user interface layer, observation control layer and equipment control layer. This paper mainly discusses the content related to the device control layer, which is mainly used to control the equipment of a telescope. We use EPICS framework to realize the unified control of telescope, camera, dome, weather station and other equipment. The device control layer of RACS2 realizes the conversion from EPICS protocol to RACS2 protocol through EPICSBridge module, so users can control the devices through RACS2.

The Astronomical Event Observatory Network is a collaboration between NSF’s National Optical/IR Astronomy Research Laboratory and Las Cumbres Observatory to develop an ecosystem of world-class telescope facilities that will enable fast and efficient follow up observations of transients and Time Domain astronomy targets in the era of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The SOAR 4.1m telescope has been the pathfinder facility for incorporating larger telescopes into this system. Here we describe the concept and architecture of the SOAR Observation Schedule manager software, which handles communications between SOAR and the Las Cumbres Observatory network at one end, ingesting automatically-generated schedules and sending back telemetry on the status of the facility, status of the observing queue, and upload of resulting data files, and on the other end “talks” to telescope and instrument, sending commands and requests, receiving back telemetry and data files.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a massive international undertaking with a myriad of software packages delivered by partners around the world. A comprehensive software development process with a focus on quality assurance has been established and agreed to by the partners to ensure a consistent and well-integrated system. Additionally, thorough requirements verification is necessary to ensure the deliverables meet the needs and requirements of the observatory. As software engineering continues to progress, technologies such as cloud-based collaboration tools and automated testing through continuous integration systems have become common place and facilitate the development and verification processes. We describe how TMT leverages the use of modern software development tools and methodologies to promote a cohesive and complete software system, using the recent construction and delivery of TMT Common Software as an example.

Scientific Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (sCMOS) image sensor has higher readout speed, higher resolution, lower readout noise than traditional Charged Coupled Device (CCDs). Since the orbital debris observation has the demand for high speed imaging system, we designed and built a sCMOS camera, and developed the corresponding operational software system. The operational software contains three lays: a software development kit (SDK), Common Language Runtime(CLR) library and an operational software with a Graphic User Interface (GUI) named PXViewer. Each of them were tested and benchmarked. Several data acquisition modes including photo, timer, continuously capture and video are implemented for different observation scenarios. Users can get fully control and operation of the sCMOS camera through the software system, including cooling, data acquisition and configuration. During the benchmark, the sCMOS camera is able to capture image of 4128*4096 pixels at 7.8 frame per second (fps), and 2064*2048 pixels at 30 fps.

We describe the design of the HARMONI adaptive optics control system. HARMONI is the first light visible and nearIR integral field spectrograph for the ELT. It covers a large spectral range from 450nm to 2450nm, and can operate in two Adaptive Optics modes - SCAO (including a High Contrast capability) and LTAO - or without AO. The project is preparing for Final Design Reviews. Control systems for adaptive optics in the ELT era will be complex hardware and software systems. In order fully to realise the scientific potential of such large telescopes, the AO control system must meet demanding requirements in terms of latency, throughput, computational performance, and data distribution. In addition, the expected longevity of such systems require them to be sustainable and serviceable for a number of decades into the future. We describe the high-level design of the HARMONI AO control system in terms of its decomposition into functional modules, and their deployment to hardware. The system is partitioned into a "hard" real-time domain, in which the wavefront reconstruction pipeline runs at the frame-rate of the AO wavefront sensors; and a "soft" real-time domain in which computationally-demanding tasks such as tomographic reconstructor calculation are performed, at slower update rates. The vital infrastructure by which real-time telemetry data is distributed forms the third leg" of the design. The mapping of the design onto the framework provided by ESO's Real Time Control Toolkit (RTC-TK) is illustrated The system will be deployed on COTS hardware based on conventional CPU-based computer servers, with GPU acceleration in the "soft" real-time domain where necessary to meet performance requirements. Finally, the performance benchmarking carried out to validate the design is presented.

The VIRUS2 instrument is a highly multiplexed Integral Field fiber-fed array of six spectrographs destined for the McDonald Observatory’s Harlan J. Smith 2.7-meter telescope atop Mt. Locke in far West Texas. Each unit consists of a CCD mosaic spanning a common spatial subaperture and four spectral channels. Six independent cryostats house the twenty-four CCDs. Each set of four CCDs, and related thermal environment, is monitored and controlled via Archon CCD controller, Arduino environmental sensor array and relays, and a set of Linux processes hosted on a dedicated off-the-shelf single board computer. The business logic layer rests on libraries derived from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) control system framework and adapted for Node-Red enabling rapid-prototyping and deployment of engineering dashboards. We describe the status of the VIRUS2 project in the context of software and controls along with the evolution of the HET APIs for migration toward standard IOT technologies.

The IRIS Exposure Time Calculator (ETC) was designed to be a publicly available aid to the astronomical community in the development of science cases for the Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) and future proposal planning. The IRIS ETC is developed from the IRIS simulator in which the signal-to-noise calculation is done pixel-by-pixel for 2D and 3D data. The IRIS ETC makes use of simulated Narrow Field InfraRed Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS) point spread functions sampling the performance at key positions across the focal plane of the IRIS imager and Integral Field Spectrograph, with varying adaptive optics performances and atmospheric conditions. Like the IRIS simulator, we model the near-infrared background with variable OH emission lines and thermal emission from the atmosphere to provide accurate noise estimates. The IRIS ETC is designed to work with the hundreds of modes given the combination of filters and grating selection. The framework, developed in Python and making use of Astropy and Photutils, can handle any 2D or 3D data input and therefore can be easily adapted for any current or future near-infrared instrument.

The ASTE Polarimeter (APol), developed by Dr. Li at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), presented a simple but innovative approach to carry out polarimetric measurements using ASTE Telescope’s TES camera. Our group at Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) has collaborated in the project since its early stages and was assigned with the task of developing the control software for the instrument. The software has been developed also keeping the simplicity concept in mind. All its functionality has been separated in simple modules which are in charge of well defined tasks. The interfaces between the modules follow the design of modern applications and are based on well defined standards, such as those used by internet applications. The instrument has also the opportunity to be tested on the JCMT Telescope, and it is going to be used as the base design for a polarimeter in the future Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT). Therefore, there is a requirement that the control software should be flexible enough to interface with at least these three telescopes, all of which run very different control software systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of APol’s control software, as well as some results of laboratory tests of the instrument.

The Primary Mirror Device Control System (M1 DCS) is one of the many Device Control Systems (DCS) included in the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) control system and is responsible for the overall control and operation of the GMT primary mirror segments. The primary mirror is composed of seven 8.4m diameter segments, six off-axis and one in the center. The active support system of each segment comprises 170 support actuators for the off-axis segments and 154 actuators for the center segment to control the mirror figure, and 6 hardpoints to control the six degrees of freedom of rigid body motion. The software design follows a component model-based architecture, implemented using the GMT core software frameworks. Software components of the M1 DCS are specified using a custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) and inherit all key features of the core components such as communication ports, default behaviors, telemetry, logs, alarms, faults, state machines and engineering user-interface without the need of a separate implementation. The communication between the real time software and the controlled devices is implemented by an EtherCAT Fieldbus in a ring topology. This master-slave standard protocol enables the control system to reach 100 Hz closed loop rate for active support control. This paper describes the software of the M1 DCS, the tests performed with different software and hardware simulators, and the strategy to ensure software readiness with the final optical mirror.

SKA Construction phase we are now in a transition phase that hopefully will prepare us for the next challenge: start building the SKA. One of the targets of this period is to evaluate the suitability of the Taranta (proper Webjive) Suite for creating engineering User Interfaces (UIs). The Taranta suite is a framework that allows the fast creation of web UIs that directly communicate with TANGO devices. What we need to address are the answers to questions such as: What kind of interface are you targeting? What are the performance constraints that you foresee? What are the current limitations of the tool that would make you choose a different one instead? What will the context of use be? What kind of features would you like the tool to have?

The Steward Alerts for Science System (SASSy) supports transient science by ingesting alerts from various sources. Cross-referencing using Q3C spatial indexing is enabled on most database tables allowing astronomers to explore the data in a variety of ways. SassyCron, a layered application, is a specific targeted search to find promising early supernovae candidates and request spectra from telescopes available to Steward Observatory science staff.

We present a software package utilizing machine learning methods to detect cloud coverage based on All Sky Camera images. The code will use different methods for nighttime and daytime cloud detection and with machine learning the accuracy of the results is improved. This piece of software will be one of the methods to be used in the Eastern Anatolia Observatory(DAG)'s 4m class telescope. For this purpose, we used Python3 and other related modules.

One aspect of the SALT X-ray transient program is the identification of SALT observation time that overlaps with scheduled X-ray satellite observations. This is particularly relevant to the optical study of X-ray transients. Since SALT is a fixed elevation telescope, the target visibility is restricted to a circular annulus on the sky covering a total of 1 380 square degrees. In order to identify satellite targets that overlap with SALT visibility, a custom Python program was developed to scrape daily schedules of a number of satellites, and calculate the SALT annulus visibility period of the satellite targets to find overlapping observation time between the satellites and SALT. If a target observation time overlaps in visibility, the relevant information is published to a web page, as well as summarised in an email for dissemination by a mailing list. Transient alerts by email is an old established method, but it clogs inboxes and requires time during the day to evaluate for scheduling — followed by an independent process to request or submit a target for observation to a telescope. It also requires a human in the loop, which will become increasingly challenging as the frequency of alerts increase over time. To streamline the process, from evaluation to submission, SALT (and by extension the SAAO intelligent observatory) is in the midst of developing a prototype TOM for the X-ray transient observations. The aim of the prototype development is to identify and implement the components that will make SALT observations more easily undertaken for the transient community using TOMs1 for target management and observation. The current SALT X-ray transient email alert software, Xsats, contains all the components necessary to migrate to a TOM transient alert interface. Additionally, because the current email alerts have been running for a while, user needs and requirements are already folded into the code; thereby permitting a straight-up mapping onto new technology, using the existing system as independent verification. This paper presents the overall design describing the migration process, as well as application-based development that will be required.

Owing to recent performance improvement and lower pricing of computers, built-in computers are equipped in virtually all measurement/control hardware, and small computers (e.g., Raspberry-Pi) can be obtained inexpensively to monitor the environment and/or hardware status. Those devices are able to communicate via network. The system having flexibility adaptable with the rapidly changing trend of hardware is desired in order to provide powerful functions quickly for the telescope control. Software developed for robot operations could be used for this purpose that controlling distributed and network-linked hardware. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source software platform and one of the most used frameworks for robot operations. It has a number of libraries and tools to help us create robot applications. Under this background, we are developing NECST (NEw Control System for Telescope) using ROS framework. In NECST, each atomic operation (such as device operation and arithmetic operation) is divided into a node which is an elemental object in ROS. Nodes are grouped and packaged by their functionalities for convenience. The control systems of telescope and receiver are built by combining those packages. Since there are about ∼100 nodes even in the telescope control part, we also developed utilities to manage nodes that visualizes sent/received data in real time. Currently, NECST is installed and operated mainly for receiver control and antenna control of 1.85-m mm-submm wave telescope.

NAOMI, the New Adaptive Optics Module for Interferometry is one of the latest additions to the Auxiliary Telescopes of the VLTI system in the Paranal observatory. The changeling task to bring new advanced features was given by the reduced space and wiring restrictions of the current telescope's infrastructure . New cables could not be installed and the exiting ones had slightly different pin-outs for each of the four Auxiliary Telescopes. These complications were overcome by using the CANopen protocol which offers low complexity with minimal wiring and robust noise immunity. Only two wires for data transfer and capable of very low baud-rates (250 k-bit/sec), allowing to use the low-frequency exiting cables. Additionally CANopen brought valuable simplicity to the integration process, like motor control for optical alignment without a PLC, multi-point access to the control bus, transmission quality tests and straightforward Beckhoff PLC integration.

In a semiconductor tracking detector, a single X-ray photon can create signals in a cluster of adjacent pixels. We present a novel technique to reconstruct the points of entry (PoEs) of X-ray photons from these clusters based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). The new method allows improving the spatial resolution into subpixel regime. Beside the improved accuracy of the reconstruction, the method is much less computational intensive than conventional event analyses and therefore can be run even on less powerful machines in realtime. Due to its special architecture, the CNN can handle different frame sizes without adjustments or retraining processes.

The selected solution for monitoring the SKA Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Prototype Integration (SKAMPI) is Prometheus. Starting from a study on the modifiability aspects of it, the Grafana project emerged as an important tool for displaying data in order to make specific reasoning and debugging of particular aspect of SKAMPI. Its plugin architecture easily allow to add new data sources like prometheus but the TANGO related data sources has been added as well. The main concept of grafana is the dashboard, which enable to create real analysis. In this paper four example analysis are presented which take advantage of four different datasources and a variety of different panel (widget) for reasoning on archiving data, monitoring data, state of the system and general health of it.