A telescope control and scheduling system for the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)

Understand

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project aimed at detecting optical counterparts to gravitational wave sources.

• The prototype instrument was inaugurated in July 2017 on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
• We describe the GOTO Telescope Control System (G-TeCS), a custom robotic control system written in Python which autonomously manages the telescope hardware and nightly operations.
• The system comprises of multiple independent control daemons, which are supervised by a master control program known as the "pilot".