The DECam guider

The main task of the guide software is to analyze the images taken with four Guide CCDs, compute the offsets of the telescope pointing with respect to the required position on the sky and relay this information to the telescope control system (TCS) to ensure precision tracking.  The past few nights the commissioning team has begun testing the guide software.  Out of the box, the guiding software correctly identified stars in the guide CCDs and was able to place the best ones (stars that are relatively isolated, not too bright, not too faint, far from the edge of the CCD) in a region of interest.  This image shows the four guide CCD region of interests with the guide stars selected.  

The guider GUIs do not work yet, and this is being investigated.  We also still need to continue testing the guider in the various modes it is designed to operate in.  But slowly, slowly, it is all coming together.

The guider software has been developed by our colleagues in Spain with the aim of creating a stable
guider with the most useful features together with a user-­friendly interface.  It has about 3200 lines
of code written in Pytho and Tkinter (Tcl/Tk).