Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr...
by imrehg on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:26PM
(#12252177)
Hey, that looks amazing! I was wondering about the software/hardware controlling the telescopes themselves, but cannot find any information on it on the website, is there any link, or that's more "behind the scenes"/non-public info?
Re:Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astr...
by WD-42 on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:54PM
(#12252516)
The software controlling the telescopes is a collection of java agents using JADE: http://jade.tilab.com/
There are many agents with different responsibilities,from driving the cameras themselves, to the mount, dome, autoguiders, etc. We use a pubsub based model to keep them all in the know.
It's a lot harder than you'd think. There is no such thing as an off the shelf professional grade telescope, so we employ a large engineering team to actually build them. Scopes and their instruments are complex and made of many independent systems and require a TON of software to run without an human operator (and even with). Scheduling observations is another challenge, an np-complete one actually. Then there's the problem of analyzing and storing gigabytes of data a day.
As a member of the relatively small software team, we have a TON to do. But it's a really cool problem to work on!