About Author

My name is Jan Soldan and I have been working at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Astronomical Institute, since 1983. Our observatory is located in Ondrejov, about 40 km from Prague.  It is a beautiful place: enjoy the Astronomical Institute.    

In 1995, I started to design and develop the first version of the Ondrejov Robotics Telescope (Czech Republic); I have also worked on BOOTES (Al Arenosilo, Spain). Those instruments are mostly related to follow-up observations of gamma ray bursts' (GRB) optical counterparts and the whole job was closely related to my PhD which I obtained from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Artificial Intelligence. My PhD thesis is titled  "Search for Optical Counterparts of Gamma Ray Bursts. Design and Development of the First Ondrejov Robotics Telescope. Image Data Acquisition and Processing."
 
In late 1997 I started working at ISDC  - INTEGRAL Science Data Centre, near to Geneva, Switzerland where I participated on software development of the Optical Monitoring Camera (CCD camera on board INTEGRAL) and several GUI applications for this project. The satellite was successfully launched October 17th, 2002, and started observations of our universe in gamma, X and optical wavelengths.  Since January 2007, I am back at the Stellar Department at the Astronomical Institute in the Czech Republic and I am a member of ESA's Gaia CU-7 development team and closely work with the Observatoire de Geneve, Switzerland on this new and exciting satellite mission. You can see more about Gaia here.

Since January 2007, I am also the main software designer and developer of SORT - the new Solar Robotic Telescope we are developing at the Astronomical Institute in Ondrejov, a fully robotic 28 cm telescope with 3 CCD cameras, a special two filter set, all on a Paramount ME mount.

I like programming, so I maintain the SBIG Linux kernel drivers (LPT & USB), of course,  in close cooperation with Matt Longmire from Santa Barbara Instrument Group. You can download this stuff from my software section for free.  I have also written an INDI  client-server driver. The INDI allows us to control SBIG CCD cameras using KStars application. My newest work is related to a Java SBIG camera client-server.  I am also playing with my own Portable Robotics Telescope application running under Linux.  Probably an endless game...but with a lot of fun.

Experience:

Linux, Microsoft Windows OS

Java, C++, C, Python, I86 Assembler

Java Eclipse, Trolltech Qt, CERN Root

Multithreaded programming

Server-client programming

Image data acquisition and processing

Linux /Windows kernel driver programming

INDI server-client drivers development