SPARC4 control system
Abstract
SPARC4 is a new astronomical instrument developed entirely by Brazilian institutions, currently installed on the 1.6-m Perkin-Elmer telescope of the Pico dos Dias Observatory. It allows the user to perform photometric or polarimetric observations simultaneously in the four SDSS bands (g, r, i, and z). In this paper, we describe the control system developed for SPARC4. This system is composed of S4ACS, S4ICS, and S4GUI softwares and associated hardware. S4ACS is responsible for controlling the four EMCCD scientific cameras (one for each instrument band). S4ICS controls the sensors and motors responsible for the moving parts of SPARC4. Finally, S4GUI is the interface used to perform observations, which includes the choice of instrument configuration and image acquisition parameters. S4GUI communicates with the instrument subsystems and with some observatory facilities, needed during the observations. Bench tests were performed for the determination of the overheads added by SPARC4 control system in the acquisition of photometric and polarimetric series of images. In the photometric mode, SPARC4 allows the acquisition of a series of 1400 full-frame images, with a deadtime of 4.5 ms between images. Besides, several image series can be concatenated with a deadtime of 450 ms plus the readout time of the last image. For the polarimetric mode, measurements can be obtained with a deadtime of 1.41 s plus the image readout time between subsequent waveplate positions. For both photometric and polarimetric modes, the user can choose among operating modes with image readout times between 5.9 ms and 1.24 s, which ultimately defines the instrument temporal performance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2412.18410,
title = {SPARC4 control system},
author = {Denis Bernardes and Orlando Verducci Junior and Francisco Rodrigues and Claudia Vilega Rodrigues and Luciano Fraga and Eder Martioli and Clemens D. Gneiding and André Luiz de Moura Alves and Juliano Romão and Laerte Andrade and Leandro de Almeida and Ana Carolina Mattiuci and Flavio Felipe Ribeiro and Wagner Schlindwein and Jesulino Bispo dos Santos and Francisco Jose Jablonski and Julio Cesar Neves Campagnolo and Rene Laporte},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.18410},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
20 pages, 14 figures, peer-reviewed paper