JCMT Telescope Control System upgrades for SCUBA-2

Russell Kackley; Douglas Scott; Edward Chapin; Per Friberg

doi:10.1117/12.857397

19 July 2010 JCMT Telescope Control System upgrades for SCUBA-2

Russell Kackley, Douglas Scott, Edward Chapin, Per Friberg

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7740, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy; 77401Z (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857397
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Telescope Control System (TCS) received significant upgrades to provide new observing capabilities to support the requirements of the SCUBA-2 instrument. The core of the TCS is the Portable Telescope Control System (PTCS), which was developed through collaboration between the Joint Astronomy Centre and the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The PTCS provides a well-designed virtual telescope function library that simplifies these sorts of upgrades. The TCS was previously upgraded to provide the required scanning modes for the JCMT heterodyne instruments. The heterodyne instruments required only relatively simple raster or boustrophedon patterns, which are basically composed of multiple straight-line scans to cover a rectangular area. The most recent upgrades built upon those heterodyne scanning modes to satisfy the SCUBA-2 requirements. With these upgrades, the TCS can scan the telescope in any pattern that can be described as a continuous function of time. This new capability has been utilized during the current SCUBA-2 on-sky commissioning phase to scan the telescope in a variety of patterns (Lissajous, pong, ellipse, and daisy) on the sky. This paper will give a brief description of the PTCS, provide information on the selection of the SCUBA-2 scanning modes, describe the changes to the TCS that were necessary to implement the new scanning modes, and show the performance of the telescope during SCUBA-2 commissioning.

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Russell Kackley, Douglas Scott, Edward Chapin, and Per Friberg "JCMT Telescope Control System upgrades for SCUBA-2", Proc. SPIE 7740, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy, 77401Z (19 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857397

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