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The new control system of the 2-meter telescope: first results

 

6 September 2009

 

Тhe tests of the new control system of the 2-meter telescope started on  August 20, 2009. Many functions of the telescope passed the tests successfully. One of the parameters characterizing the system is the pointing accuracy of the telescope. The improvement of the accuracy requires pointing to several tens of stars, measurement of the corrections and their analysis. The specialists of the Czech company Projectsoft, who are designers of the new system, use for this analysis the model of Patrick Wallace, TPOINT. In the night of Sept 3, 2009 the telescope has been pointed to 29 stars and the corrections have been measured which bring the stars to the centre of the detector. These corrections have been used to model the errors caused by misalignment of the polar axis, nonperpendicularity of the axis, bending of the tube and other deviations of the telescope from the ideal case. The calculated model was introduced into the control system and, on Sept 4, 2009, corrections have been measured by pointing the telescope to 38 stars, uniformly distributed over the visible sky hemisphere. The results of the measurements before and after application of the model are shown on the figures, where the axis are connected to the coordinates of the stars. The horizontal and vertical arrows show the corrections along the hour angle and declination, respectively, and the length of the arrows is proportional to the values of the corrections. Both figures have identical scales and the difference of the pointing before and after application of the model is obvious – the pointing accuracy is dramatically improved. Much more increase of the pointing accuracy is expected after collecting measurements of the corrections for about several hundreds stars.

 

All activities concerning the new control system of the 2-meter telescope are performed with financial support from the National Science fund, contract No. DO 02-85.

 

 

 

   

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