For those of us who do astronomy, whether visually or for astrophotography, polar alignment is a procedure that we are familiar with, and have to do before every observing sessions, unless we have a permanent observatory.

Yesterday, I released ETL-Astro, a set of Python programs that generate astronomical catalogs in a variety of formats from license friendly data source, allowing for incorporation in GPL-licensed products.

The programs can do the following:

After nine months of modifying the OnStep open source telescope controller to run on the cheap STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, it is time to reap the fruits of this long labour: I have an OnStep powered mount ...

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.