The Astronomical Event Observatory Network is a collaboration between NSF’s National Optical/IR Astronomy Research Laboratory and Las Cumbres Observatory to develop an ecosystem of world-class telescope facilities that will enable fast and efficient follow up observations of transients and Time Domain astronomy targets in the era of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The SOAR 4.1m telescope has been the pathfinder facility for incorporating larger telescopes into this system. Here we describe the concept and architecture of the SOAR Observation Schedule manager software, which handles communications between SOAR and the Las Cumbres Observatory network at one end, ingesting automatically-generated schedules and sending back telemetry on the status of the facility, status of the observing queue, and upload of resulting data files, and on the other end “talks” to telescope and instrument, sending commands and requests, receiving back telemetry and data files.
Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) and the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) are home to several telescopes, ranging from 4.2 to 0.9 meters in diameter. Every telescope has one or more working instruments, which are used every night of the year; keeping this vast amount of instruments (which includes a very big multi-ccd focal plane as well as visible and near infrared imagers and spectrographs) functioning in a way that ensures an appropriate science quality on each one of them is not a minor challenge. In order to help with this task we have developed an observatory-wide Detector and Instrument Quality Control system, which consist on a set of centralized tools: real time telemetry for all the instruments, automatic detector quality performance assessment, electronic logbooks, instrument software logging, image visualization, etc. All the data goes to databases and is available via web browsers.
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