Overview of Software

The 2dF/AAOmega software system is controlled through a number of user interface tasks (seen in Figure ). The 2dF/AAOmega control computer is actually aatlxy and is located in the electronics rack behind the blue screens and above the CCD VME systems. For technical reasons, the control tasks appear on the dual headed console of aatlxb.

The control tasks are as follows:

The 2dF Control Task (tdfct) -- This task is responsible for loading and initialising all the others (see Figure ). It contains status windows for all the subsystems it controls as follows:

• Telescope
• Positioner
• ADC (Atmospheric Dispersion Compensator)
• AAOmega Spectrograph
• CCDs control

Each of these sections contains basic information on the status of the subsystem and a More button. Clicking on this button will bring up a control window which provides more detailed control of the specific subsystem.

FPI Control Task (fpictrl) -- This task provides control of the focal plane imaging camera, and its gantry (see Figure ). It is possible to use this task to drive the FPI to almost any star in a configuration file. It is used for field acquisition and for the astrometric calibration process. The images from the FPI camera are displayed by the IMG task which has its own window. Due to a lack of readily available image display software at the time of the initial construction of the 2dF system, this custom written display task requires an 8-bit display and so currently operates within an 8-bit VNC session running on the console.

The Positioner User Interface (POS) -- In recent times the POS task has been largely superseded by the use of the tdfeng engineering interface (see Figure ). Under normal operation the main purpose of the POS task is/was to provide a mimic display of the 2dF positioner. It also includes the ability to control most of the positioner functions. In normal operation, however, the positioner should be controlled through the control task's positioner control window, whenever possible, rather than through the POS task.

Figure: The console of aatlxb showing the 2dF/AAOmega control system in operation