The Telescope ALert Operations Network System

TALONS - Telescope Alert Operations Network System.

TALONS is a network program originally designed and engineered to support the RAPTOR telescope system. From its initial conception in 2000, it was seen as growing to eventually provide communication services, not only for RAPTOR, but for other telescopes needing this type of network. TALONS has been in full operation since 2002.

TALONS uses a client/server architecture engineered as a centralized bi-directional hub, typical of most Distributed Sensor Networks. The main elements of the TALONS system consist of a centralized server, client libraries, a manual alert processor and a network monitor, with each software component engineered to work jointly. However provisions have been made for outside software clients to be able to connect to TALONS as long as they adhere to protocol constraints. The key to TALONS is its ability to grow dynamically, remain fault tolerant, support any instrumentation, provide data security, and most importantly allow collaborative processing between clients.

The design of the TALONS code is very flexible and has allowed for the connection of outside networks and databases. TALONS acts as a communication hub for GCN, including translating the GCN alerts into VOEvent format for databasing and transmission to clients.

In late July of 2005, Alasdair Allan of the University of Exeter and Robert White of Los Alamos National Laboratory integrated eSTAR's peer-to peer network with TALONS, creating the first truly heterogeneous astronomical meta-network.

For more information see the Thinking Telescope Project (http://www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov) website.

Note: The TALONS acronym was originally called TALON, but to deferentiate it from Elwood Downey's obsevatory control software (called Talon) and due to the fact we always added the word "System" anyway, we descided to change the name to TALONS in 2004.