The Nassau Station Robotic Telescope

The Warner and Swasey Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University is currently upgrading the 0.9m telescope near Chardon, OH (east of Cleveland). The plan is to develop a fully robotic telescope that operates in a direct imaging mode as well as with a bench spectrograph. For the official department page on this project please click here.

My work

I am responsible for about 40,000 lines of code (and growing) in C++ and Perl for the Nassau Station Robotic Telescope.

My primary responsibility these days is to the completion of my PhD thesis, but this is the work I do to pay the bills.

I am involved with this project in helping with the hardware upgrades as well as writing the software for some of the telescope support sub-systems. All the code is being written in Microsoft C++ using the Microsoft Developer 5.0 (not my choice). The rumor is true that this process involves about 50% general swearing, 50% cursing Bill Gates, and 50% cheering in jubilation when I stumble on a kludge that performs the task that the MFC routines were suppose to do without major revision. Here's the software I've completed to date:

• Remote control program for the switching on and off of the telescope electrical sub-systems through a PC installed DSP card.
• Remote control program for reading out data from the weather station.
• A Dynamic Link Library of functions to control inter-program pipe communications.
• Diagnostic tools to debug pipe communications between client and server programs.
• Data archive capabilities added to the weather station monitor program.
• Write in-house documentation for completed sub-systems controls
• Incorporated rain/snow sensor output into the weather montior
• Layered Weather monitior program to allow immediate response to queries
• Completed a mock-up of the web form for the telescope interface as a step in development
• Completed the online user registration and information interface
• Completed the CGI scripts for taking observation proposal requests
• Install selected procedures as services active on boot.
• Wrote DLL for serial port communications
• Wrote CGI scripts for remote database administration
• Web display of weather conditions at the station.
• Web display of polaris monitor output at night
• Installed second DSP (#1) and modified software to control
• Re-Wrote in house documentation for Weather Sentinel and DSP controler.
• Wrote the master scheduler program which writes the nightly command and control stack for the telescope from the request database.
• Updated the polaris monitor output to the web.
• Wrote a routine to pick guide stars
• Local dump of weather archive data by date to text
• Add NSRT Proper Names catalog search on proposal form
• Online user administration utilities
• Added planets and minor planets to whole shebang
• Added an online image mosaic generator
• Worked a great many bugs out of Linus
• Web display graph of polaris results in realtime.
• Web display graph of temperature in realtime.
• Add dark time and data pipeline options to the proposal request form.
• Educate LINUS to discriminate between dark time (no moon) and light time (moon up).
• Wrote an end product sorter to organize the download area
• Wrote archive search engine
• Setup archive mounting and administration for old telescope data.
• Write a script builder for the data pipeline
• Automate user notification of completed proposals
• Web display of polaris monitor output for last 30 days
• Write software to avoid overexposure on new CCD chip. Basically on the fly censuring of inappropriate exposure times based on a pointing map.
• Modify backend pipeline to compress raw data
• Automate archiving to be done with as little manual interaction as needed
• Modify Linus to unembargo data in dowload area that is older than one month.
• Put in email notification of Linus errors
• Setup Linus to run every day
• Write a program to share our weather data with www.weatherunderground.com
• Build set of software tools to help with archival storage and retrieval of old data

• Upgrade DSP to be a bit more transparent and user friendly
• Web display of current telescope status (software development)
• Improve the accuracy of the subroutines used to calculate the position of solar system objects relative to the position of the NSRT
• Completely automate the archival storage and retrieval of old data

If you are working on a similar project and wish to swap routines, information, or stories about how Microsoft (the evil empire) screwed you over with their last MFC upgrade; send me e-mail.

Back to John C. Martin's Homepage