Alan Bridger (UK Astronomy Technology Centre), Gillian Wright (UK Astronomy Technology Centre), Min Tan (UK Astronomy Technology Centre), Alan Pickup (UK Astronomy Technology Centre), Frossie Economou (Joint Astronomy Centre), Malcolm Currie (Joint Astronomy Centre), Andy Adamson (Joint Astronomy Centre), Nick Rees (Joint Astronomy Centre), Maren Purves (Joint Astronomy Centre)
The Observatory Reduction and Acquisition Control (ORAC) system is to be commissioned at the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) following this meeting. This system replaces all of the existing software which interacts with the observers at UKIRT. The ORAC project took an overall systems-level approach to modernising the user interfaces at UKIRT. The aim is to improve observing efficiency with a set of integrated tools that take the user from pre-observing preparation, through the acquisition of observations to the reduction which uses a data-driven pipeline. ORAC is designed to be flexible and extensible, and is intended for use with all future UKIRT instruments, including the mid-infrared imager-spectrometer Michelle. It is also designed to allow integration with electronic phase-1 tools and queue-scheduled observing in anticipation of possible future UKIRT requirements.
For an existing observatory, the provision of an up-to-date, forward-looking, observatory control system must also accommodate existing telescope hardware and "legacy" instruments. By taking pragmatic design decisions, ORAC supports the operation of legacy instruments, while also not requiring major upgrades to other infrastructure.
ORAC also re-uses much code from other systems and we discuss issues relating to the the long-standing trade-off between reuse and the generation of new software specific to our requirements.