Abstract

The correction of every existent observation error is impossible. Nevertheless, the approach taken to do this should be the best possible one. Regardless of the fact that there are a huge number of problems to solve, if one knows how much they affect the observation for given conditions then it would be possible to observe as desired by counteracting these deviations. Automatic pointing adjustments help us to do this by providing mathematical support to model the perturbations, and therefore the deviations. This paper presents a generic open-sourced pointing system developed by the ALMA-UTFSM team, intended to work with the gTCS. This pointing system includes several physical terms, terms with spherical harmonics and user-customised terms which allow the generation of pointing models in a generic way. Accurate results have been obtained with test data. Graphical support is also included in our work and helps to show the variation between experimental and theoretical values of several variables in relation to different coordinates. Thanks to its open-source characteristic, it could be easily integrated into a TCS, automating the pointing calibration process for a given telescope and allowing the interesting unseen functionality of changing the pointing model while observing.