QC 351 A7 no. 20 / The control system described in this thesis was designed to
automatically guide the position of photographic plates during long
exposures of astronomical objects. The system senses the position of
the guide star which is being used as a position reference, and moves
the photographic plate in two orthogonal directions in order to
maintain a constant position of the image of the astronomical object on
the photographic plate.
The system was designed to have a bandwidth of 35 radians per
second in order to track the worst case image excursions due to
atmospheric turbulence and telescope motion. The closed loop transient
response of the system was determined from considerations of final image
resolution of the photographic plate. Due to the necessity of guiding
on stars of unknown brightness the system incorporated an automatic
gain control loop within the forward control loop and was made
unconditionally stable by high order feedback.
In operation on the Steward Observatory telescopes, the system
has made a significant increase in photographic plate resolution over
manually guided plates.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/621613 |
| Date | 10 October 1967 |
| Creators | Reed, Michael A. |
| Publisher | Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona) |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Technical Report |
| Rights | Copyright © Arizona Board of Regents |
| Relation | Optical Sciences Technical Report 20 |
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