The Telescopi ROBotic de ARas (TROBAR) is a new robotic facility built at
Aras de Los Olmos (Valencia, Spain). This is a 60 cm telescope equipped with a
Galactic H
TROBAR is located at the Observatori Astronomic de Aras (OAA), approximately 100 Km north-west of Valencia, at an altitude of 1330 m, in a region of low light pollution. The telescope, realized by Teleskoptechnik Halfmann, has a main mirror of 60 cm in diameter, with a classical Ritchey-Chrétien optical scheme; a Nasmyth focus is present, to which an optical camera is attached. The telescope can slew as fast as 10 deg/sec allowing to point any region of the sky in less than a minute. A filterwheel hosts standard Sloan
TROBAR main features.
Device | Value |
---|---|
M1 diameter | 60 cm |
Focal length | 4800 mm |
Mount | Alt-az—Nasmyh focus |
Camera | Fairchild |
FoV | |
Filters | Sloan u, g, r, i, z; Strömgren u, b, v, y; H |
Low level control of telescope pointing capabilities is done by the
The optical detector is a Fairchild Peregrine 486 back-illuminated CCD, providing an array of
The telescope can be both remotely controlled and robotically operated and a set of commands also allows to perform almost all the operations via scripting procedure. Here we will outline its robotic capabilities.
The operations which can be performed by the telescope comprise the acquisition of calibration frames (bias, darks, sky flat field, and focus) and the observation of scientific targets.
All the software is written in python, with the Object Oriented paradigm. All astronomical calculations are performed through the pyephem libraries (
The routine operations are managed by a set of 3 main programs, in communication one with the other through TCP/IP connection. The adoption of the TCP/IP paradigm allows a complete independence of the software from the running machine, hence allowing fast replacing of hardware in case of problems. These high level programs communicate with low-level processes managing the corresponding device (see Figure
Flux diagram of the main cycle of the observation manager.
The organization into three main programs directly reflects what are the main duties an autonomous observatory should accomplish, namely, check meteorological conditions, safely manage the dome opening and, when all the conditions are good enough, send an observation to the telescope. In the following sections the realization of each one of these processes will be described.
Meteorological information is collected by a DAVIS Vantage Pro meteorology station, installed on a pillar located 10 m away from the dome; it is equipped with sensors for measuring air pressure, inner and outer air temperature and relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation and rain rate.
Meteorological data is collected by a dedicated process, called
External humidity must be below 85%.
Difference between the dew point and current external temperature as absolute value must be grater than 3 degrees Celsius.
Wind speed must not exceed 15 m/s. If the speed is between 12 m/s and 15 m/s then an azimuth limitation flag is raised, meaning that the telescope should avoid to point directly into the wind and to the 180 degrees around it.
Atmosferic pressure must be above 870 hPa.
Rain rate must be equal to zero.
If any of the above conditions is not satisfied, then the
The enclosure of the telescope is a classical hemispheric dome with two vertical sliding doors. The dome can rotate at a maximum speed of 6 degrees per second, which, during the pointing, translates to an average delay of 30 seconds respect to the telescope, so that the pointing of the telescope is poorly affected by the dome and it is not a concern at all for the scope of the scientific project.
The program
To provide a socket interface to the dome actions: although for robotical operations the dome is kept synchronized to the telescope position, so that it is not necessary to reposition the dome before each observation, its status is continuously monitored by another process, running on a different machine, which detects malfunctions and informs the team accordingly.
As autonomous process, it continuously acquires the meteorological conditions and decides to open or close the dome depending on meteorological conditions and sun altitude. Currently, the dome is allowed to stay opened when the sun in below
The third main process,
Flux diagram of the main cycle of the observation manager.
Due to a limitation in the low level software controlling the camera provided by the camera company, it is currently not possible to interrupt an ongoing observation. The information collected by the two threads is then used at the end of the exposure for validating the observation; if at least one of the two threads reported an error, then the target is ingested back into the archive for subsequent reobservation.
Although the scheduling software already takes into account constraints whose dissatisfaction can reveal dangerous for the telescope, the observation manager, before starting each target, performs a bunch of checks which prevent the telescope from directly pointing towards the sun, the moon and towards those directions which cannot be reached by the telescope and would thus send the telescope to its limit switches.
Each one of the above processes is coupled to an isAlive program. This is a crontab regulated job periodically checking that the corresponding process is running and, if this is not the case, restarting it.
The set of targets is organized in a MySQL table. Each target can be associated to a user-defined priority value with the logic that the lowest is the value, the highest is the priority; in addition the definition of all the most common constraints under which each target should be observed, such as the maximum moon fraction and distance, minimum and maximum airmass, and periodicity of observation is implemented.
The fundamental idea behind the scheduling algorithm is to try to observe each target when it is closest to its minimum airmass (either because it is transiting through the meridian or because the user set a greater value in the minimum airmass field). This is achieved in the following two steps:
(i) the scheduling software makes a first pass through all the targets, selecting only those whose constrains are satisfied from that moment and through all the exposure time;
(ii) a figure of merit (FoM) is then applied to each of the selected targets. This FoM is a generalization of the
The
Figure
Scheduler FoM for objects with the same priority = 1,
Note that targets with
The FoM expression can of course be generalized by introducing multiplicative parameters with the effect of shifting in time the points where the FoMs of targets with the same RA but different
All the software runs on almost
In addition, each machine has its own UPS system granting power supply to the computers in case of shortages. A UPS for the dome is also foreseen to be installed in the near future.
The coding is now complete at the 80% level and we foresee to complete it by the end of the year. In particular one of the tasks we still need to implement is the procedure of automatic focusing. This will be achieved by a single exposure, tentatively at the beginning of the night, on which a bright star is imaged with different focus offset and by slightly moving the telescope between one acquisition and the next. The image will then be analyzed using SExtractor [
In parallel we started to develop a pipeline for the reduction of the survey data. This will make extensive use of the pyraf environment for the prereduction processes (bias subtraction, flat field correction, etc.). Detection of the objects on each image will be managed by SExtractor; its mag_auto value will be used as a first estimation of the flux, which will then be used by DoPhot [
We described the software for the robotization of TROBAR, with the aim of performing a survey of the Galactic Plane, looking for H