Telescopio Nazionale Galileo control system upgrade, new milestone achieved: azimuth axis completed

During the last few years we have been working on a modernization plan for the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) Control System1,2. On October 2019 we had the opportunity to execute the first step of this process. The telescope was going to be stopped for one month due to M1 mirror being aluminized, so we could change the azimuth control system, that had been thoroughly tested during the summer, with no additional observational time loss. In this paper we present the new control system based on the CompactRIO platform from National Instruments, the switching process between the old and the new control systems, and a performance comparison between them.

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[2]  Pietro Schipani TNG control system software architecture improvement , 1998, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.

[3]  Adriano Ghedina,et al.  A new telescope control system for the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo II: azimuth and elevation axes , 2016, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[4]  P. Schipani,et al.  Towards new servo control algorithms at the TNG telescope , 2020, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[5]  Adriano Ghedina,et al.  A new telescope control system for the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo: I – derotators , 2014, Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation.