Safety

With the possibility to operate most of our (observing) systems at the mountain remotely there is a safety issue. In principle people can use the web cams and call the control room to see if anybody is working with the telescope or instrument, but when running (especially automated) observing scripts somebody might not be aware of that and get his/her hands in while a filter wheel rotates or a pick-off mirror is moved. The general idea is to provide commands that can be issued at the telescope and would prevent the use of the telescope or instrument remotely. There is the possibility that this might affect some remote (test) observations and people should use these commands with care, but safety is more important.

In the case of observing system commands moving anything inside instruments that are mounted on the telescope things are somewhat complicated as there is no direct difference when issuing a command from a window on a computer that is opened remotely or locally. Beyond adding checks to individual commands, an option might be to inhibit or permit in general all commands to a specific (part of an) instrument. Of course, a solution is to simply switch-off an instrument, but we will first have a look if there is a (simple/feasible) software implementation. The same issue applies to the use of the telescope, but this is discussed below.