THE WYOMING INFRARED OBSERVATORY TELESCOPE SOFTWARE SYSTEM

We describe the University of Wyoming telescope control and data-acqui sition software system. The software was designed to be maintainable, portable, and inexpensive. Moreover, the, software was designed to all ow rapid communication between the hardware, the data-acquisition proc esses, and the tracking processes, while leaving each distinct. We sho w how the new real-time features embodied in the POSIX.4 standard and implemented in the Unix compatible LynxOS operating system allow us to perform all of our tasks on a single 80486 machine with a standard Un ix-like environment, with outstanding real-time performance. We discus s our telescope pointing model, which allows us to point with a root-m ean-square error of less than 5 arcsec over the sky with the 2.3-m tel escope. For more detailed investigation and use, we will make the soft ware available through anonymous FTP.