Telescope-Control

This project creates a service that will control the telescope remotely.

For VSCODE: The telescope is a large dobsonian reflector [[telescope-control.telescope]].

For GitHub: The telescope is a large dobsonian reflector.

Components under control:

• ZWO ASI120MC-S (color) camera with ZWO 1/3" 2.1mm 150 degree lens as a finder scope.
• ZWO ASI482MC camera as the main telescope imaging camera
• StepperOnline Nema 23 Bipolar 1.8deg 2.4Nm (340oz.in) 1.8A 4.95V 57x57x104mm 4 Wires controlling telescope heading.
• StepperOnline Nema 17 Bipolar 1.8deg 65Ncm (92oz.in) 2.1A 3.36V 42x42x60mm 4 Wires controlling telescope azimuth angle.

Telescope Control GUI:

I currently envision this as 2 heads-up displays.

• Finder camera view - used for large motion to objects visible in the night sky.
• Telescope imaging camera view - used for seeing through the the telescope remotely and acquiring images.

Running App

The application is currently jupyterlabs based framework. This allows me to investigate and create commands in notebooks till I'm happy with the concepts. Then I can migrate them to code.

To launch the server:

nohup jupyter notebook --ip 192.168.0.30 &

Git project @ https://github.com/mgrandau/telescope-control

Project

Phase 1 - Basic remote control of the telescope

The goal is to lay the ground work to do the basics of the control application. Move through the finder heads-up display. Do fine motion through the telescope imaging heads-up display.

Capture image stacks for compositing into a final image.

Phase 2 - Goto controls

Extend the finder view to goto a specific RA/Dec position. This should allow me to quickly move to things of interest.

Phase 3 - Star Tracking

Phase 4 - Satellite Tracking ML

Phase 5 - Tracking as TinyML

Source

As the project progresses I will identify the modules.

• finder_camera - Component that encapsulates functionality provided by the finder camera.
• server_service - web server that provides functionality for controlling the telescope.
• gui - GUI for controlling the telescope. Implemented as HTML, Javascript and CSS in a jupyter notebook)