PRiSM software will be used to slew the telescope. User interactive panels have been done to control the telescope and to point towards any place in the sky.
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Prism
software as a telescope control system, left the telescope control panel,
right top, the status panel, and right middle the telescope status whilst
slewing to a target.
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The system is also able to apply any kind of speeds to the drives, so as to track any moving object, such as comets, asteroids and satellites.
Moreover, MCMT+PRISM are capable to tune the sidereal tracking speed to prevent atmosphere effects, known as the "King's" effects.
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| This plots shows the relative King speed (ratio between the actual speed to apply and the "classic" sidereal speed-1 tour per 23h56m04s) versus the hour angle. Many curves for various DEC values. Latitude value is, here, equal to 45°. Despite an absolute variation of 0.1% (i.e. 0.001). In our case (432 teeth) MCMT provides 128.3605 1/128 microstep per second. The MCMT accuracy is 0.003 relative to 128.3605 which is 0.002% or 50 time the accuracy of the king's variation. Thus MCMT is able to tune very accurately the speed to the King's speed for any object in the sky and the speed to be updated by Prism to MCMT every 5-10 seconds. |
This software also controls the MAYA CCD camera, and soon we are about to make code allowing the system to work in a completely standalone way.
The
rings are installed, and only a laptop is necessary to operate the telescope.
Also pointing model can be applied (TPOINT algorithms) to this telescope thanks
to our PRISM software.