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Session 41 - Visible & UV Telescopes.
Display session, Thursday, January 08
Exhibit Hall,
The National Undergraduate Research Observatory (NURO) has developed the capability of integrating CCD acquisitions and IRAF in a PC environment. Taylor has ported the IRAF Control Environment (ICE) to LINUX, a free and partially POSIX1.b compliant PC-based UNIX operating system. Since July of 1997, NURO has been operating with ICE as the primary acquisition control program for its instrumentation.
NURO is a consortium of primarily undergraduate institutions chartered to provide research experiences to undergraduate students. The consortium uses the Lowell Observatory's 0.8-m telescope and supports their own Photometrics Series 200 CCD camera as their primary instrument. Prior to the ICE implementation, visitors familiar with ICE had missed the image analysis capabilities inherent to IRAF. Since ICE is an external package available for IRAF, all of the IRAF analysis tools are immediately available for real-time data reduction.
ICE has been in use at the Steward Observatory and at NOAO for several years, but until now has only been available for the more expensive workstation platforms. The advent of faster PCs and the availability of PC-based UNIX operating systems should make the flexibility of ICE available to many small observatories.
