Stellarium

Request: Telescope track control

Asked by Bloo

Hello,

I've been using Stellarium for a long time and I think it's a great software.
I tried the Telescope control with Stellarium but it definitely lacks a Track function to follow an object.
Would it be possible to send a continuous flow of data thru the serial connection in order that the telescope follows its target ?

Thanks,

Regards

Greg

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

At the moment, Stellarium's telescope control protocol supports only two functions: giving the telescope a "slew" command and receiving from the telescope its current coordinates. Unfortunately, the person who has created it doesn't seem to be interested in expanding it, and the current maintainer of that piece of the code (me) doesn't even posses a telescope.

Some time ago I wrote a quick-and-dirty patch for tracking satellites that sent a new command on every cycle. It felt bad, though, as I wasn't sure how a telescope would react to this stream, and I don't have the hardware to test it.

There's a planned plug-in that adds support for the INDI device control protocol. It will allow sending "track" commands to telescopes that support them, but it's still in the planning stage.

Revision history for this message
sweiller (sweiller) said : 		#2

Hi Bogdan,

As the owner of the ISStracking yahoo group***, I would be very happy and some other members of the community too, to test any special versions or patch of the new Stellarium including ISS or other satellite tracking capabilities !

We have many telescopes to make test (especially LX200 and LX200 GPS, ETX and more)!

This is very important to us and a possible opening for the future !

For the time being we use Satellitetracker but all development on this software is stopped. The visual interface is old.
See this page if you want to donwload it.
http://sweiller.free.fr/ISS/ISStracking.htm chapter 3.
Recent TLE are downloded from SpaceTrack (by registered users).

I hope you will go into this project which should be successful !
Thanks in advance ,

Sylvain
PS : if you want to join, I will invite you wih great pleasure !

*** and member of the Satellitetracker group

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