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Hi All,

I have a project in mind which deals with telescopes

I want to be able to sit inside my house and view through my telescope via my computer.

There are two different issues involved:

  1. Getting an image from the telescope. For this I need some sort of detector mounted in place of the eyepiece on our telescope: webcam, video camera, or CCD detector. These are widely available from most telescope dealers.

  2. Controlling our telescope: pointing it at the object, tracking, and focusing. ( Most advanced goto telescopes can be controlled in this way by computer software like Orion, Celestron, and Meade make such telescopes, and software to control the scope is available from Starry Night, etc.)

I want to achieve this by making use of beagleboard-xm to control the movement of the telescope, its focus adjustment and capture the images and send it to a PC. So one main application runs on PC and it sends/receives control and data to the telescope and beagleboard-xm lives in the telescope.

guys need your suggestions.

Thanks,
Haneef

Hi Haneef,
You dont mention your telescope model or capabilities. Most goto’s have a communication
protocol language. Olders ones use serial port, some later ones use usb. You need the communications protocol for your scope to write an application to communicate with it.
Webcams only work for bright objects like the sun, venus, mars, saturn, jupiter.
Some digital cameras have a longer exposure setting and remote capability but again, you need
the communications protocol for the camera. Most likely a USB port is used. These digital cameras
can pull in some deep space especially if using a fast lens.
Most people that want to do serious deepspace astrophotography from their comfy chair
wind up spending several thousand dollars/Euro to make it happen.

Sounds like a fun, exciting, frustrating project you have there.

Don Lewis
djlewis on #beagle