Abstract

A Telescope Control System (TCS) is a software responsible of controlling the hardware that an astronomical observation needs. The automation and sophistication of these observations has produced complex systems. Currently, a TCS is compound by software components that interact with several users and even with other systems and instruments. Each observatory has successfully developed a wide spectrum of TCS solutions for their telescopes. Regardless the mount, there are common patterns in the software components that all these telescopes use. As almost every telescope is custom designed, these patterns are reimplemented again and again for each telescope. This is indeed an opportunity of reuse and collaboration. The Generic Telescope Control System (gTCS) pretends to be a base distributed framework for the development and deployment of the TCS of any telescope, independent of its physical structure, the type of mount and instrumentation that they use. This work presents an architecture specification explained through two complementary approaches: the layers perspective and the deployment perspective. The first approach defines a set of layers, one on the top of the other, offering different levels of abstraction. Meanwhile the deployment perspective intends to illustrate how the system could be deployed, focused on the distributed nature of the devices.