Sky AutoTrack is an open sourced solution to electronic telescope alignment and astronomical research. This project was completed over the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters at Georgia Tech by Nicholas Button, Austin Dill, Edward Foyle, Meera Nathan, and Megan Yang.
This desktop application has been tested on the following operating systems:
- Windows 10
- Windows 8
- Windows 7
In theory, it should work on any Windows Operating System.
- Must be an ASCOM compliant electronic telescope
In order to utilize the full capabilities of this application, you must have the following:
- Webcam
- Cable to connect your telescope and your computer and the corresponding driver
Before this application can be installed, you must install the following:
Note that you must install Python to C:\Python27 (this is the default installation location)
If you want to compile this yourself in order to make any custom changes to our application you will need to download Visual Studio.
After making any of your changes in the Visual Studio IDE, you can select publish from under the Build list on the toolbar.
If you would like to run the application as initially designed, you can simply download the zip file and run setup.exe
Though we have been unable to test with a physical telescope, using a simulator has allowed us to be the infrastructure for automated telescope alignment.
Our application can search for astronomical objects such as stars, galaxies, and constellations based on their common names. Upon returning the search results, the resultant coordinates can be used to direct the telescope towards the desired object.
Application sessions can be recorded and saved into a CSV file containing the datetime and the telescope's right ascension and declination.
Difficult and tedious tasks can be automated with the use of Sky AutoTrack's macro system. This is a simple programming language that allows users to set a sequence of actions for their telescope including record, slew, and park. For more information see our helpful tutorial.
This is the most easily extensible part of our application as it is an interpreted language with a resursive descent parser and a simple lexer.
For more information on the current state of features, see the release notes.