pyScope: Optical Telescope Automation with Python

Small to midsize optical telescopes are a common resource utilized by colleges and universities for various astrophysical research and classroom applications. These instruments can be dedicated to specific curricular goals and research that would be impractical on larger, competitively allocated telescopes. By providing unrestricted access to these often-existing educational resources, these instruments fill a critical gap in performing challenging experiments requiring significant time-intensive, skilled, exploratory, or developmental observations. We are developing a new, open-source Python package for robotic observatory control and operation called Pyscope. Driven by Astropy, we have developed this package with undergraduate student support for experienced and amateur astronomers that provides a unified interface for scripting astronomical hardware. This package originated from the University of Iowa’s Iowa Optical Telescope Automation (IOTA) code, which undergraduate students have iteratively developed for the last eight years, building off nearly three decades of institutional history in telescope automation. Pyscope natively supports standard astronomical hardware, including the ASCOM Platform, PlaneWave software, and MaxImDL. We also have included a simple pipeline for easy custom hardware integration into Pyscope. Observatories using Pyscope can take advantage of the Telrun module, allowing fully robotic scheduling and operation through a standard and consistent API with upcoming support for triggered interruptions for transient sources. With several essential data calibration, reduction, and analysis tools for CCD and CMOS detectors–designed for data collected using Telrun methods–users may quickly begin advanced analyses. An observatory may have scheduling, data reduction, and storage processes on a local server, with operations occurring on a remote machine. The ongoing development of Pyscope has primarily been supported by the Macalester-Augustana-Coe Robotic Observatory (MACRO) Consortium, which operates the Robert L. Mutel Telescope located at Winer Observatory in Sonoita, AZ.

Here is the link to the AAS244 IPoster presentation.