SPARC4 control system

TL;DR

The paper details the development and testing of a comprehensive control system for the SPARC4 astronomical instrument, enabling simultaneous photometric and polarimetric observations across four bands with optimized timing performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated control system for SPARC4, including software and hardware components, and evaluates its performance in photometric and polarimetric modes.

Findings

Allows acquisition of 1400 images with 4.5 ms deadtime in photometric mode

Achieves 1.41 s deadtime in polarimetric mode for measurements

Provides configurable readout times from 5.9 ms to 1.24 s

Abstract

SPARC4 is a new astronomical instrument developed entirely by Brazilian institutions, currently installed on the 1.6-m Perkin-Elmer telescope of the Pico dos Dias Observatory. It allows the user to perform photometric or polarimetric observations simultaneously in the four SDSS bands (g, r, i, and z). In this paper, we describe the control system developed for SPARC4. This system is composed of S4ACS, S4ICS, and S4GUI softwares and associated hardware. S4ACS is responsible for controlling the four EMCCD scientific cameras (one for each instrument band). S4ICS controls the sensors and motors responsible for the moving parts of SPARC4. Finally, S4GUI is the interface used to perform observations, which includes the choice of instrument configuration and image acquisition parameters. S4GUI communicates with the instrument subsystems and with some observatory facilities, needed during the observations. Bench tests were performed for the determination of the overheads added by SPARC4 control system in the acquisition of photometric and polarimetric series of images. In the photometric mode, SPARC4 allows the acquisition of a series of 1400 full-frame images, with a deadtime of 4.5 ms between images. Besides, several image series can be concatenated with a deadtime of 450 ms plus the readout time of the last image. For the polarimetric mode, measurements can be obtained with a deadtime of 1.41 s plus the image readout time between subsequent waveplate positions. For both photometric and polarimetric modes, the user can choose among operating modes with image readout times between 5.9 ms and 1.24 s, which ultimately defines the instrument temporal performance.