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Telescope control system for the Warwick 1m telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma.

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Talon telescope daemon

talon_mountd interfaces with and wraps the low-level talon daemons and exposes a coherent telescope control interface via Pyro.

tel is a commandline utility for controlling the telescope.

Configuration

Configuration is read from json files that are installed by default to /etc/mountd. A configuration file is specified when launching the server, and the tel frontend will search this location when launched.

{
  "daemon": "onemetre_telescope", # Run the server as this daemon. Daemon types are registered in `rockit.common.daemons`.
  "log_name": "teld", # The name to use when writing messages to the observatory log.
  "control_machines": ["OneMetreDome", "OneMetreTCS"], # Machine names that are allowed to control (rather than just query) state. Machine names are registered in `rockit.common.IP`.
  "telescope": "W1m", # Either W1m or NGTS  
  "query_delay": 1, # Delay between shared memory queries.
  "initialization_timeout": 60, # Maximum time allowed for talon's telescoped to start.
  "slew_timeout": 120, # Maximum time allowed to slew from any position to any other position (note: telescoped has its own separate value).
  "focus_timeout": 60, # Maximum time allowed for any focus adjustment (note: telescoped has its own separate value).
  "homing_timeout": 120, # Maximum time allowed for each axis homing command (note: telescoped has its own separate value).
  "limit_timeout": 120, # Maximum time allowed for each axis limit command (note: telescoped has its own separate value).
  "ping_timeout": 5, # Maximum time allowed to acknowledge a ping command.
  "ha_soft_limits": [-72, 90], # Allowed hour angle range in degrees (pre-filters bogus pointings with a more graceful error than talon failing)
  "dec_soft_limits": [-30, 85], # Allowed declination range in degrees (pre-filters bogus pointings with a more graceful error than talon failing)
  "focus_tolerance": 0.005, # (W1m only) Consider a focus command complete when it is within this many micron of the requested value.
  "security_system_daemon": "onemetre_roomalert", # (W1m only) Daemon to check whether the W1m security system has tripped.
  "security_system_key": "security_system_safe", # (W1m only) Switch name for the security system status.
  "park_positions": {
    "stow": { # Positions that can be used with 'tel park'.
      "desc": "general purpose park protecting the mirror and instrument", # Description reported by 'tel park'.
      "alt": 35, # Altitude in degrees.
      "az": 25 # Azimuth in degrees.
    }
  }
}

Initial Installation

The automated packaging scripts will push 4 RPM packages to the observatory package repository:

Package Description
rockit-mount-talon-server Contains the talond server and configuration for the W1m telescope.
rockit-mount-talon-client Contains the tel commandline utility for controlling the telescope server.
rockit-mount-talon-data-onemetre Contains the json configuration files for the W1m telescope.
rockit-mount-talon-data-ngts-m06 Contains the json configuration files for a NGTS telescope.
python3-rockit-mount-talon Contains the python module with shared code.

After installing packages, the systemd service should be enabled:

sudo systemctl enable --now talon_mountd@<config>

where config is the name of the json file for the appropriate telescope.

Now open a port in the firewall:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=<port>/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

where port is the port defined in rockit.common.daemons for the daemon specified in the config.

Upgrading Installation

New RPM packages are automatically created and pushed to the package repository for each push to the master branch. These can be upgraded locally using the standard system update procedure:

sudo yum clean expire-cache
sudo yum update

The daemon should then be restarted to use the newly installed code:

sudo systemctl restart talon_mountd@<config>

Testing Locally

The server and client can be run directly from a git clone:

./talon_mountd onemetre.json
MOUNTD_CONFIG_PATH=./onemetre.json ./tel status

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Telescope control system for the Warwick 1m telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma.

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