Observatories that I have visited:
NOT at La Palma, Spain

Content:

1. Going to La Palma and NOT
2. Our mission
3. The telescope NOT
4. The IR camera
5. The road up to the telescopes
6. Control room of NOT
7. The clouds
8. Other telescopes at La Palma
9. The island La Palma
10. The END

6: Control room of NOT

NOT with the North Star behind. NOT was pretty far ahead with innovation in the technology. Do you see the gaps under the dome? They were there to get a better thermal stability in the local atmosphere. The entire building rotates when the telescope is rotated into various positions. This is to optimize the length of the cable between the telescope and control room and avoid sliding contacts.

Computers already existed in the 1990s and many such were needed to control all measurement systems. Telescope control was done by a program developed in Pascal, ANSI C. The operating system used in the academic world is UNIX. He who developed the program came down a couple of days and I had time to talk a lot with him. He traveled around the world in different observatories, most exciting seemed to be at the visits on Spetsbergen, rifle (polar bears) in one hand and instruments in the other!

The French people inspect the data of Hale Bopp, they was able to see the comet core's rotation, or let say the trace of it in the dust.