Category Astronomy

Ok, so remote means just a few meters away, either in the house or in the car. Somewhere warm anyway.

So, as mentioned in my previous post, I’d done a lot of research, and one of the things I came across was this video:

This is what I want to be able to do. I’ll never have the room for an actual observatory like this one, but I could at least automate a lot of the work. That’ll scratch at least two, maybe three, of my geek itches. Of course, everything has to be Linux based, and also as cheap as possible. With that, I decided on at least the following to start with:

• AstroEQ – Definitely needed goto support on my EQ5 mount to start with.Fully made systems can be bought (minus steppers and mounting hardware), but I already had most of the parts laying around the place so decided to make it myself using an Arduino Mega
• Indilib – This, running on a raspberry pi acts as a remote control server for anything that I wanted to add. All devices had to be supported, or easy enough for me to add with my limited programming skills.
• Guide Scope – These are used to ‘lock’ onto a star and make sure that the telescope mount follows it precisely. Long exposures of up to even 30 minutes can then be achieved without too much difficulty. Initial plans are to try and use the Raspberry Pi camera (will try both standard and NoIR) versions.
• Focuser – Last essential part for remote control is the ability to focus the telescope. This will use the DSLR attached and a stepper motor coupled to the focus knob. There are a couple of arduino based projects that emulate the MoonLite protocol, which is supported by indilib.

Once I’m happy with this lot (and I *will* blog my progress) and have some of my other projects finished (*cough* R2), then I want to take a look at a couple of other add ons such as:

• Filter wheels – I can use kstars to take many photos with different filters in place, and also with a black filter I can automatically take dark frames for stacking images. (Dark frames are used to remove noise in the picture that is generated by the DSLR)
• Auto lens cap – A simple servo driver to cover the telescope main lens. Not really necessary, but figured it would be a nice project.

I should be able to do all of this fairly easily. I already have most of the components necessary, and the software running on my workbench. One of the big issues I’ll need to work on is just how to mount it all to the scope and stop the cables getting tangled!

My next blog should be on building and configuring the AstroEQ.

Hi, my name is Darren and I’m a serial hobbiest.

Well maybe not that bad, most of my hobbies are pretty much related (electronics, computers, science), and a lot are things I’ve been interested in since I was a kid. Most recently, I’ve invested in a fairly decent telescope and mount to do some visual astronomy, but more for astrophotography. I want to take pretty pictures of things very far away! So after a lot of reading of various blogs and websites (Star Gazers Lounge forum is fantastic), and watching numerous youtube videos, I got a tripod for my camera and a couple of cheap lenses off eBay. That is all that is needed and you can get some half decent shots.

My astrophotography album

But it wasn’t enough. So I dove back into the forums and did even more research, and learnt a few important things.

• Telescope – Numerous different types, mainly split into reflectors, refractors, and catadioptric. All have their benefits and downsides, but for doing astrophotography the telescope isn’t the most important item surprisingly.
• Mount – This, for astrophotography, is the most important thing to get right.You need to have a solid mount for doing anything more than a few seconds exposure, and one with tracking in Right Ascension at least, to track the stars. And it really needs to be an equatorial mount to avoid rotation of the starfield as it rotates.
• Eyepieces – You need eye pieces to view through a telescope, and the shorter the focal length, the greater the magnification. These are generally only used for visual astronomy, as cameras bypass the need.
• Camera – Most DSLR cameras block out a large part of the infra red by design, but you can get them modified to remove this filter and get much more vibrant images. Its not a necessity, but definitely a nice to have.

Whilst learning all this, I had a thought in my head about some form of computer control (Linux based, of course) and actually stumbled upon a few projects to help with this. The first was AstroEQ which was an opensource ‘Goto’ system (select a star, and the telescope will automatically move to center on it) designed around an arduino. That was a perfect start for me, and I was pretty sure I could get it working from Linux. Thats when I discovered indilib!

Indilib is an open source system for controlling all sorts of astronomical instrumentation, not just goto mounts, but also things like auto focusers, digital camera, filter wheels, and other custom devices you may want. Even better, all this can be run from a Raspberry Pi as the control server and a laptop using the actual astronomy software. This would mean I could set it all up, and retreat to somewhere a little warmer to actually do my observations and photography. I’m sure this is against the amateur astronomers code or something, but damn it gets cold out there.

Along with indilib, there is kstars. This is a planetarium program written for the K Desktop Environment, and with EKOS plugin can control any indilib hardware. Not only that, it can schedule work and sequences, and help you plan your observations.

I’m going to (try to) write more blog posts chronicling my progress on getting all this set up, and some HowTo posts on using indilib on a raspberry pi, with kstars, and any custom hardware I make.