We present the development of a remote observation system runnig on world wide web (WWW). The system consists of a 30cm Schmidt Cassegrain telescope and ST-7 CCD camera. We built the controllers and drivers of the telescope and the control softwares including the network control. The self-developed techniques in the hard wares and softwares can be applied to other projects in Korea. Observers can access the system via WWW home page, to reserve observation times, to send control commands, to retrieve images and various information useful for observation. This system can be widely used by students and amateur astronomers as well as professional astronomers who need a lot of small telescope time.

We installed windscreen at the BOAO 1.8m telescope dome, in order to reduce the degradation of image Quality under strong wind larger than 8m/sec. The windscreen was designed on the basis of that installed at the MSSSO 2.3m telescope dome in Australia. We developed control system (remote control and user program) of the windscreen, being able to operate the windscreen at observation room. We tested the performance of the windscreen under strong wind of 6-15m/see. Tracking error of the telescope, especially in altitude-axis, was greatly decreased when the windscreen was used. Standard deviation of the error was estimated to be less than 0.3arcsec, which has little effect on image quality.

We propose the development and test result of new optical axis alignment system for the interchangeable F/8 secondary mirror of the BOAO 1.8m telescope system. Since the original system was not equipped with a suitable optical alignment facility, the whole alignment process was performed by hand. It was necessary at least three persons working more than 2 nights and the altitude of the telescope could not exceed 10 degrees, in such altitude the alignment quality was not so good by atmospheric effect. The new system adopts position readable motorized system and remote control operation by the computer installed in observation room, which reduces the number of workers to only one and eliminates the altitude restriction. The defocused CCD image pair obtained at higher altitude makes the aberration estimates more accurately and the number of required alignment loops is reduced from 10 to 4. The system has been installed on September 1, and performed alignment three times. The test results show that the system is stable and accurate, gives better optical performance of the telescope under F/8 focus. We hope to emphasize the fact that the new system will increase observation time of the telescope by about 20 nights per year assuming one alignment in every month.

The development of universal CCD camera control software for all BOAO CCD camera systems is proposed. The new software, running under Sun SPARCstation and motif based X window system with SunOS 4.1.3 operating system, replaces existing control software based on NeXTstation color and NeXTstep 2.1 operating system which is no more produced now. Several new features of the new software is introduced, some of which are 1) the image contrast is enhanced by color manipulation and display, 2) image zooming and trimming, 3) any size of image can be displayed in the scrolled window, and 4) the offset between telescope pointing position and CCD center is easily calculated by alt-azi map. Along with the above new features, the new software has advantages including ease of maintenance and upgrading and elimination of risk caused by hardware damage. Since September 1, the software beta version is being used by observers and there is not seen severe problem regarding the software itself, but several requests to equip more features to the software will be mirrored to future release.