Developing the GOTO Telescope Control System

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is an astronomical survey project utilising a network of robotic telescopes to monitor the night sky from two sites: La Palma in the Canary Islands and Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. The GOTO Telescope Control System (G‐TeCS) is a custom robotic control system, written predominantly in Python, which autonomously manages the telescope hardware and nightly operations, as well as directing the overall observing strategy of the network. Development of the control system begun prior to the commissioning of the first GOTO prototype on La Palma in 2017, and continued through the expansion of the La Palma site in 2021 and the addition of the Australian site in 2023.

At the sites, each telescope is automated by G-TeCS through a master control program (the “pilot”), which monitors and sends commands to the hardware daemons that interface with each part of the telescope hardware (cameras, mount, dome, etc). The pilot has robust systems for monitoring external conditions to ensure the safety of the telescopes in bad weather, as well as routines to attempt recovery of the hardware should any errors occur.

Also part of G-TeCS is the central alert monitoring and scheduling system, which is hosted at Warwick University in the UK. The G-TeCS “sentinel” listens to alert streams from different astrophysical detectors and processes any new alerts into targets for the GOTO telescopes. These are then sent out to the sites by the “scheduler” system, which also monitors the telescopes and determines what they should observe between alerts.

Here we will give a brief overview of the GOTO project and the G-TeCS software, focusing on the RSE involvement and outlining the future work planned over the next two years.

MD is a member of the Research Software Engineering team and the Astrophysics Research Cluster in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sheffield, and is funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant number ST/T003103/1.

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) project acknowledges the support of the Monash-Warwick Alliance; University of Warwick; Monash University; University of Sheffield; University of Leicester; Armagh Observatory & Planetarium; the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT); Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC); University of Portsmouth; University of Turku, and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, grant numbers ST/T007184/1, ST/T003103/1 and ST/Z000165/1).