Since 17 March 2023 the control and acquisition system of the telescope was upgraded, by replacing the old CCD camera with a new Andor Zyla 4.2+ sCMOS camera water cooled USB3.0 (Figure 4.). This led to modifying the optical path a little to maintain the same spatial resolution that the telescope had before the upgrade.
The new sCMOS camera has the following characteristics:
Active pixels : 2048×2048 pixel (4.2 Mega pixel)
Sensor size: 13.3 x 13.3 mm (18.8 mm diagonal)
Pixel size: 6.5 ɥm
Pixel readout rate: 540 MHz
Frame rate: 53 imm/s a (2048×2048) , 1578 imm/s a (128×128)
Read noise: 1.1 e-
The camera is connected to the PC via USB3.0 port.
Figure 4.: sCMOS camera Andor Zyla 4.2+
The new control system software (TPS) for all telescope movements was developed in C++ using Visual Studio 2022 in a Windows environment (Figure 4.1). The new control board has a microcontroller to communicate via USB with the control software on the Windows PC.
To obtain an accurate movement of the mount, the driving speed of the two movement motors is obtained in hardware, by 2 Numerically controlled_oscillator (NCOs) in turn driven by a 32.768kHz temperature compensated quartz oscillator. The camera acquisition and control system software were implemented on a modern notebook with a Windows 10 OS.
The operating diagram of the PSPT2.0 is showed below in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.1: The new camera acquisition software (left) and control system software TPS (right).
Figure 4.2: PSPT2.0 Operating Scheme