Abstract
A Ritchey-Chretien 1.2 m telescope (EULER) and the High- Resolution echelle Spectrograph (CORALIE), a new Swiss observing facility at ESO La Silla Observatory, are operational and since Summer 1998. The Observatory operation is fully automated and supports the unattended, attended and interactive mode of operation under local or remote control. The control hardware is based on Local Control Units (LCU) built from PC/RedHat Linux computers and a Unix Computing Server. The Operational Software is built around INTER, a command language interpreter featuring communication control, data access, image processing functions and easy access to external resources. The general SW architecture is a non-hierarchical tree of pairs made of hardware- independent interpreters running on the Observing Server and hardware dependent servers running on the LCU's. The Operational Software includes the full access (Creation/Modification/Retrieval) to the input/output databases, telescope, instrument and auxiliary set-up and control files as well as a full data-reduction pipeline. We describe briefly the system architecture, summarize the performances and the experience gained over 18 months of operation and we discuss some critical issues: use of standard components, parallel operation, real-time requirements, system upgrade and maintenance.
