A telescope control and scheduling system for the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)

Abstract

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project aimed at detecting optical counterparts to gravitational wave sources. The prototype instrument was inaugurated in July 2017 on La Palma in the Canary Islands. We describe the GOTO Telescope Control System (G-TeCS), a custom robotic control system written in Python which autonomously manages the telescope hardware and nightly operations. The system comprises of multiple independent control daemons, which are supervised by a master control program known as the "pilot". Observations are decided by a "just-in-time" scheduler, which instructs the pilot what to observe in real time and provides quick follow-up of transient events.

arXiv comment14 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Austin, Texas, 10-15 June 2018

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• Kilonova Detectability with Wide-Field Instruments
• Low-Cost Access to the Deep, High-Cadence Sky: the Argus Optical Array
• Seeing-limited imaging sky surveys -- small vs. large telescopes
• Rotational variation of the linear polarisation of the asteroid (3200) Phaethon as evidence for inhomogeneity in its surface properties
• The Large Array Survey Telescope -- Science Goals
• Machine Learning for Transient Recognition in Difference Imaging With Minimum Sampling Effort
• Searching For Fermi GRB Optical Counterparts With The Prototype Gravitational-Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)
• The Evryscope Fast Transient Engine: Real-Time Detection for Rapidly Evolving Transients
• Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines I : Production of coadded frames
• Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines II: Forced Photometry and light curves
• Detecting the early optical flashes of gamma-ray bursts with small telescope arrays