The Readout and Control System of the Dark Energy Camera

Klaus Honscheid; Ann Elliott; James Annis; Marco Bonati; Elizabeth Buckley-Geer; Francisco Castander; Luiz daCosta; Angelo Fausti; Inga Karliner; Steve Kuhlmann; Eric Neilsen; Kenneth Patton; Kevin Reil; Aaron Roodman; Jon Thaler; Santiago Serrano; Marcelle Soares Santos; Eric Suchyta

doi:10.1117/12.925717

24 September 2012 The readout and control system of the Dark Energy Camera

Klaus Honscheid, Ann Elliott, James Annis, Marco Bonati, Elizabeth Buckley-Geer, Francisco Castander, Luiz daCosta, Angelo Fausti, Inga Karliner, Steve Kuhlmann, Eric Neilsen, Kenneth Patton, Kevin Reil, Aaron Roodman, Jon Thaler, Santiago Serrano, Marcelle Soares Santos, Eric Suchyta

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II; 845112 (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.925717
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is a new 520 Mega Pixel CCD camera with a 3 square degree field of view designed for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). DES is a high precision, multi-bandpass, photometric survey of 5000 square degrees of the southern sky. DECam is currently being installed at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-m telescope at the Cerro- Tololo International Observatory (CTIO). In this paper we describe SISPI, the data acquisition and control system of the Dark Energy Camera. SISPI is implemented as a distributed multi-processor system with a software architecture based on the Client-Server and Publish-Subscribe design patterns. The underlying message passing protocol is based on PYRO, a powerful distributed object technology system written entirely in Python. A distributed shared variable system was added to support exchange of telemetry data and other information between different components of the system. We discuss the SISPI infrastructure software, the image pipeline, the observer console and user interface architecture, image quality monitoring, the instrument control system, and the observation strategy tool.

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Klaus Honscheid, Ann Elliott, James Annis, Marco Bonati, Elizabeth Buckley-Geer, Francisco Castander, Luiz daCosta, Angelo Fausti, Inga Karliner, Steve Kuhlmann, Eric Neilsen, Kenneth Patton, Kevin Reil, Aaron Roodman, Jon Thaler, Santiago Serrano, Marcelle Soares Santos, and Eric Suchyta "The readout and control system of the Dark Energy Camera", Proc. SPIE 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II, 845112 (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.925717

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