Telescope Command Summary

All telescope commands are prefaced by 't' and must be lower case. The MOVE commands themselves are not case-sensitve. They are all mapped to uppercase before processing.

These commands are generally passed directly to the MOVE computer without any special processing. Most commands are two characters followed by zero, one or two arguments. Arguments are restricted to integer values only except for the ON command. The arguments for three special commands (CO, ER, and RM) are processed by the daemon to convert them from a user friendly format to that required by MOVE. Commands in italics are used in the queue but are usually reserved for use in special maintenance file command sequences.

Note: The telescope cannot go North of +64:17 declination. This is not safe at all hour angles but is only a problem for hour angles > 6 hours. +61 is pretty much safe everywhere. At -47:30 on the meridian, the telescope is just seeing the bottom edge of the dome slit.

ALTAZ X X Move to altitude,azimuth
CO X Y Move to ra,dec - equinox 2000.0
CS Close shutters
DJ X Dome jog: move dome by X degrees
DM X Enable automatic dome
DS X Deadman switch, activate in X seconds
EE file Ephemeris enter (file is name of file)
EG X Ephemeris go to object X
ER X X Enter rates, in s/hr, "/hr
FG X Change focus to absolute position
FI Initialize focus
FR X Change focus by relative amount
FS Flat Screen
FT X Focus type (0=Absolute, 1=Relative) ???
HO Move to home position
ID Initilize dome
LI X Toggle light
LM X Set lock mode
LP Move to last saved position
LS X Toggle light supression flag
NU Null
ON X Move to named Object
OS Open shutters
RF X Read from file and go to it
RM E N Relative move, in arcsec (East, North positive)
RP Restore position
SF X Read sky from file and go
SL Sleep
ST Set MOVE clock, no change in pointing.
SP Save position
TC X Track on/off
UC Update coordinates
UI Move to twilight flat sky position
WK Wake



An X indicate a required argument. For all that are logical values, on is 1 and off is 0. Again, except where noted previously, all arguments are strictly integer numbers. CO can accept a pair of "free-form" coordinates, equinox 2000 only. RM takes two numbers in arc-seconds (decimal ok). ER takes two numbers in arc-sec/hour (decimal ok).

Most commands return their responses pretty quickly. There's a 1 second timeout on most of these. The exceptions are: ER (0.5 seconds), HO (30 seconds), OS (210 seconds), RM (5 seconds), UI (30 seconds).


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Marc W. Buie, Southwest Research Institute

Page last modified, 2009 Jul 15