Thursday 24 April 2014

Fun with Domes (PART 4)

The dome pointing algorithm has so far been improved a good amount but there are still some things that can be done; things that require much more than merely tweaking some parameters.

Fun with Domes (PART 3)

This is where I start delving deeper into the mathematics behind the dome control algorithms. After all this it was a good week before I stopped having dreams about spherical polar coordinate transforms.

Wednesday 23 April 2014

Fun with Domes (PART 2)

In my last blog post I talked about how I had started to investigate the positioning of the dome and I had found some areas of the sky where the galaxy camera was being obscured by the top of the dome.

Thursday 10 April 2014

Fun with Domes (PART 1)

Over the last week or so I have been doing some investigating into the algorithms that control the positioning of the dome throughout the night. It has been a long journey full of pitfalls and surprises but it might be leading to better dome positioning from now on.

Monday 7 April 2014

Some thoughts on schedulers

Over the years we have had many people present their views on how the telescope's scheduling system isn't working fairly. It's an interesting point for discussion so here I want to share my two cents on scheduling systems and how they work.