Astronomy
A bit of history
The project to establish an astronomical observatory in the Montsec mountain range emerged in the early 1990s, with the biochemist from Lleida, Joan Oró, and the foundation that bears his name as its main visionaries. For this reason, once the OdM’s main facilities began operating in October 2008, the first telescope installed there was named Joan Oró. This telescope has been fully operational since 2010 and has been developed and improved to become one of the most technologically advanced 1-metre class robotic telescopes in the world.
Today, the Montsec Observatory has become a key research infrastructure within both the Catalan and the international ecosystem. Many people have contributed to this project, and many more keep it alive by using its facilities and working to enhance it.
a multi-purpose observatory
Robotic control systems
The telescopes at the Montsec Observatory cover a wide variety of scientific cases, including transient astrophysical phenomena. This type of multi-purpose observatory requires the ability to change operations planning in real time and to maximise efficiency by delegating decision-making capacity to a control system that operates without human intervention.
A complex software architecture controls all operations of the Joan Oró telescope. This architecture is managed by OpenROCS, an open source software developed to control robotic observatories, in combination with a set of self-developed software modules, including a scheduler (ISROCS), a data processing and analysis tool (ICAT) and a task control system (OCS). Low level control of the telescope and dome is done with TALON software. Finally, the management of proposals sent by users is carried out through a web application called MUR.