Automating data management system of 1.5-meter telescope at Tartu Observatory
Date
2020
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
The aim of this thesis is to automate data management system of Tartu Observatory’s 1.5-meter
telescope which deals with metadata production. Currently, almost none of the instruments used
for observations are connected to one another and that leads to a great amount of manual work,
namely adding information about the instrument configuration into the headers of all collected
individual data files. In order to achieve an automated system, a modular approach was used and it was created with
the industry standard technologies such as Messaging Queues and ASCOM. Additionally, the
system had to be near real-time as it was important to have information of the instruments,
though a delay of few seconds was allowed.
Besides the new technologies, old tools had to be updated as well, since most of them had not
been supported for several years. A custom-made software Astrolab, responsible for providing
information and control of the telescope, was written in Python 2 programming language and
ran on Ubuntu 10.10. Both of these are obsolete and for the newly developed system components
to work properly, the old ones needed to be updated as well.
This thesis describes all of the technologies used for the data management system. It provides
the reasons behind each tool used as well as how they are implemented. The finished system
helps the user observe stars more easily by automating some of the processes.
Keywords
ActiveMQ, ASCOM, arvutid, astronoomia, kontroll, tarkvara, teleskoop, astronomy, computers, control, software, telescope