<title>Object model of the Liverpool Telescope</title>

Abstract

The Liverpool Telescope will be a fully robotic 2m telescope situated in La Palma and managed from Liverpool John Moores University. The telescope observatory control system is responsible for operating the telescope in a fully automated fashion, with observations selected from a database. After a brief introduction to object-oriented techniques this paper presents a class model for observatory control system database and discusses the choice of programming language and database management system. Finally, we present a brief description of the automatic code generation tool we have developed to allow fast and reliable implementation of the object model and discuss our overall experience of using object-oriented techniques to implement an observatory control system.