Intelligent stargazing: the observatory control system for meter class telescopes at South African Astronomical Observatory

South African Astronomical Observatory has been spearheading an effort to modernize the optical/IR observing facilities in the country and also from across the African continents to network them to form an Intelligent Observatory (IO), operating robotically from a centralized control brain. To achieve such an ambitious system, one need to be equipped with modern technologies, computation capabilities, real-time coordination between observers and observatory, autonomous trigger management system etc. The primary objective is to enable a comprehensive facility for the follow up observations triggered by the most sophisticated global facilities like LSST, ROMAN, zTF, CTA etc. in near future. The recent developments at SAAO, the Observatory Control System (OCS) has proven to be an integrated sub-component of the complex IO architecture. The OCS, because of a simplistic fragmentation in terms of the definitions of the various components: such as telescopes, instruments, observations, logging; helped the IO architecture uniquely to integrate very old telescope and instruments, originally not designed for the automated operations. The OCS has reduced a lot of burden of the observatory management team by providing a communicable database for managements and data visualization.