The Telescope Robot Web Application

Built on top of all the previously mentioned components are more components which are specific to the Web application in question – in this case the interface to the telescope robot.

2.3.1 Personal Menu

Because the Web site is large and has many sections, a dynamically generated menu page is available for each user. The code which generates the menu examines what sort of account the user holds and what permissions they have for access to various parts of the site. A menu based on the findings is created, which allows the user to quickly navigate around the site.

2.3.2 Own Requests

The purpose of the telescope is to make observations for users; to allow users access to a list of the observations they have requested themselves, a page entitled “Your Requests” was created which located just that user's requests and displayed them in a

paged list. This part of the site deals with requests, as such the details entered by users when they make requests are displayed here, such as a user's own comments about their requests. Each request also links to the job which was created for it.

2.3.3 Search of Jobs Database

A comprehensive search system allowing users to specify almost any job parameter to search with was created (detailed further in Chapter IX). Results are delivered in a paged list, with each item linking to an individual page about that job – which then links to the various methods to view the job.

2.3.4 Web-Cams

Pages were created to expose all of the Web-cam images taken at any one time by the many cameras at the Tenerife site. A background process retrieved new images from the robot every five minutes and the Web pages used these cached images, in order to minimise the usage of the bandwidth to the robot. These pages are the most popular on the whole Web site, as they provide an instant insight into what the robot and its surrounding area look like.

2.3.5 Weather Information

To allow users to understand the environmental conditions at the robot, a page displaying the most current weather data was created. The background process responsible for communicating with the robot retrieved ten minute averaged weather sensor samples, every ten minutes. The weather page always showed the latest results, but also provided graphs of the last 24 hours of sensor data from each sensor. The graphs were updated once per hour. Another, slightly more complicated page was developed to allow users to retrieve a set of weather data for any given time and date. Results would be retrieved from the database and displayed in a similar way to the

current weather page: Graphs for the specified day would be generated, and if a time was provided by the user, the closest set of ten minute averaged sensor samples was also displayed.

2.3.6 Image Gallery

Discussed further in Chapter IX, a gallery of the robot's best work was created, allowing quick and easy access to high quality astronomy images processed into JPEG images for viewing on simple Web pages. The gallery could also be displayed in chronological mode, allowing users to monitor images other users were submitting to the gallery at the time.

2.3.7 Photo Gallery

To provide a background perspective to the project, galleries of images taken by team members on their visits to the robot were made available on the Web site. Originally created to photographically document the construction of the current Tenerife telescope robot, the gallery eventually contained pictures of everything from the surrounding area to very detailed pictures of the robot-supporting hardware. Even some pictures of the team members made it into the gallery!

2.3.8 Real-Time Data

One section of the Web site provided access to the real-time data system, where a stream of up-to-the-second information from the telescope robot and weather station was displayed. This is documented in Chapter VIII.

2.3.9 Waiting Jobs List

A paged list of every waiting (active) job in the pool was created to allow users to see the robot's workload. A background process on the server closely mimicked the

scheduler at the robot and stored simulated scores in the database. This allowed the list to be sorted by job score (and therefore what order the jobs would be observed in). The simulated scheduler data were also displayed to allow examination of the scheduling process.

2.3.10 Documentation

Instead of using a pre-written Content Management System (CMS) for articles and documentation, and then adding on all the above extra functionality as custom modules, the Web interface for the telescope robot was created in the opposite manner. The core site and unique functionality were written specifically for the project and a pre-written CMS solution was added on for the documentation. The MediaWiki (Wikimedia Foundation n.d.) software from the Wikimedia Foundation was installed into the Web server to handle Web-based viewing and editing of articles and documentation. It was customised to only allow members of the team to provide the content and to automatically hook into the existing Web site user authentication system. In addition, the Mediawiki software was accessed indirectly through its API rather than allowing Mediawiki to generate HTML pages directly. This allowed wiki articles to use the existing Web site's style sheets and formatting functionality – blending in the article and documentation pages almost seamlessly.

2.3.11 Community Forum

The readily available open-source community forum system phpBB (phpBB Group n.d.) was installed into the Web server to allow users to interact with the BRT team and each other, to discuss telescope operations, observations of particular interest, and general astronomy topics.