On Friday 27th of January, 2018, I gave a presentation at the KW RASC on Al-Sufi's Book Of Fixed Stars.
The book is the first illustrated pictorial star atlas, and was very influential for centuries after it was authored. It spread widely from central Asia, throughout the Middle East, and to Europe. It was translated into many languages.
Here is the presentation slides, and audio recording:
One of the obstacles in using OnStep is the process of configuring it. A user should start with a spreadsheet that calculates certain parameters. The user is supposed to check that they lie between acceptable ranges mentioned in the spreadsheet.
If you use a telescope for astronomical observation or astrophotography, or a camera for night scenes, such as the aurorae, star trails, and the like, you must have experienced dew building up within an hour or less.
AstroEQ is another GOTO telescope controller from the UK.
Basically, the author was a university student when he started this project, to convert a non-GOTO motorized mount into a GOTO mount.
A ready made AstroEQ controller is available for purchase. It has USB on one side, and two connectors for steppers on the other.
In these pages, I describe how to make a Do It Yourself (DIY) Telescope Controller. That is, a piece of electronics that would at a minimum drive motors on the telescope to track the sky.
The features should be:
OnStep Telescope is an open, very capable and feature rich telescope controller by Howard Dutton.
On October 2nd, 2017, I gave a talk at the KWLUG on Open Source Software for Astronomy.
The software programs demonstrated in this talk include the following:
Using a planetarium program is a very common thing for any amateur astronomer. I use three such programs, namely: Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel (SkyCharts), and KStars.
When I select a Linux version to run, I always use the latest stable long term release version. For example, for XFCE based Xubuntu, I am now on 16.04.
However, being with a long term release version means that for some software packages, you will have older versions. One such case is telescope automation platform, Ekos and the associated INDI Library.
To make sure that you are running the latest Ekos and INDI library, you can do the following:
First, purge all the KStars and INDI packages, if they are installed:
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