Toshiyuki Sasaki

Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph for the 8-m SUBARU Telescope

The concept design of the faint object camera and spectrograph (FOCAS) for the 8.2 m SUBARU telescope (JNLT) is presented. The FOCAS is designed for enabling observations of extremely faint galaxies distributed over a 6 arcmin FOV with spectral resolution of R equals 1000. Fully transmitting optics will produce high quality images better than about 20 micrometers rms diameter over the entire FOV in white light of a wavelength range of 0.365 - 0.9 micrometers . A pair of abuttable CCDs with 4000 x 2000 pixels of 15 micrometers square pixel size are considered to be used. Several observing modes are available with the automated multislit assembly and changable optical elements. Control software coupled with telescope control software enables an automatic observation of several tens of galaxies simultaneously.

Observation scheduling and data acquisition with the Subaru control system

The control system for the Subaru telescope is designed to consist of distributed workstations, local processors, and data acquisition computers, which are interconnected by control LANs and data LANs. The control software achieves its functionality with message-based communication. Two key processes, a scheduler and a status logger cooperating with any other processes, are designed to perform efficiency and security in observation. Control flow of observation scheduling and functionality of sub-processes which constitutes the scheduler and the status logger are described. For data acquisition from instruments, Subaru control system provides a variety of data highway which enable instruments to transfer data by up to 20 Mbytes/second. Functionality and characteristics of other subsystems which compose the Subaru control system are described.