Barco streamlines operations for astronomical exploration at Gran Telescopio Canarias

The control room of Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world’s most powerful optical and infrared telescope, previously relied on a variety of monitors, computers, and servers accumulated over time. Maintaining this heterogeneous environment posed a constant challenge. When switching over to a Barco video wall and operator workspace, Gran Telescopio Canarias could finally offer its team and visitors an advanced technology environment, worthy of its ambitions.

The Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) is the world’s largest and one of the most advanced optical and infrared telescopes. Located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands (Spain), it enables world-class science observations, studying astrophysical phenomena such as black holes, early star and galaxy formation, distant exoplanet physics, and dark matter and dark energy. GTC’s massive light-collecting surface of 75.7 square meters and exceptional image quality make maximum use of the observatory's excellent sky conditions.

Control of the telescope and other instruments is done remotely from the control room. From there, a team of operators, including a telescope operator and an astronomer, are managing a variety of sources: the status of the telescope and the dome, the data collected by the telescope and science instruments, and the weather conditions.

Heterogenous technology stack

The GTC control room had started as a typical office environment with a heterogenous mix of monitors, appliances, and servers all stacked close to each other, a set-up which had organically grown over the years into a complex collection of technology that was difficult to manage.

“We had come to a point where our technology was difficult to manage and maintain,” says Romano Corradi, General Director at Gran Telescopio de Canarias, S.A., the company operating the GTC. “The heterogenous nature of our systems also made it difficult to connect new systems, which means that it had become hard to scale our operations.”

For the operator team, the mixed set-up made it difficult to manage its sources in a flexible way. Changing layouts, adapted to the specific needs of customers or to changing environmental conditions, was cumbersome. Sharing content from a workstation to an overview screen was also difficult and sometimes, to the team’s frustration, it led to losing a configured layout and to double work.

In need of an integrated control room solution

Gran Telescopio de Canarias wanted to upgrade its control room with a more stable, integrated monitoring and visualization solution, enabling the company to manage its content in a flexible way and with an image quality that does justice to the exceptional images that are collected by the GTC.

But for Gran Telescopio de Canarias, an upgraded control room, matching today’s state of the art, also offers other benefits: an impeccable corporate image to name but one. “The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, and in particular the Gran Telescopio de Canarias, receives thousands of visitors every year, many of them dignitaries and key people in the field of politics or astronomy,” says Luis Alberto Rodríguez García, Head of Engineering Operations at Gran Telescopio de Canarias. “It’s only fitting that we can present them with a control room that matches the world-class technology of our telescope operations.”

The team at Gran Telescopio de Canarias thoroughly scanned the control room market and came in contact with Room Dimensions Iberica, a Spanish Barco partner and integrator of technology and ergonomic furniture for critical control rooms. Extensive Barco demos at Integrated Systems Europe, the world’s largest AV systems integration show, convinced Gran Telescopio de Canarias that Barco was the right partner for the job.

Always-on video wall

For the GTC control room, Barco proposed a Barco UniSee II LCD video wall in a four by two matrix, in combination with Barco’s TransForm N CMS control room management software and a Barco OpSpace operator workspace solution.

The team was impressed by the image quality, color uniformity, perfect alignment and bezel-less LCD panels of Barco UniSee II, making the video wall act as one uniform canvas. The technical team was particularly fond of the video wall gravitational support system, which makes it easy for them to service the video wall from the front and quickly change panels in case of need.

“Time is very precious for us,” says Romano Corradi. “The observations for our customers are scheduled in a way that optimizes the use of the telescope according to the prevailing sky conditions. We always have a tight schedule, and many programs are even simultaneously active. Every technical hiccup or intervention is costly time lost, which means that we need our video wall to be up and running as much as possible. The UniSee II mount system helps us to achieve that.”