Inspiration
Most amateur astronomers cannot afford automatic tracking and positioning systems for their telescopes. We want to share our passion about astronomy with those who are intimidated by the cost of observational astronomy and the difficulties associated with it.
What it does
The user will input their location (latitude, longitude, elevation) and the celestial object they want to observe. Our system will retrieve the objects location, in AltAz coordinates, in which the observer is located at the origin, and send the angles, via serial, to the Arduino which controls two servos. The servos rotate along phi and theta, and points a laser at the object.
How I built it
We took advantage of the robust astropy module to retrieve and transform the coordinates. We then transmitted the angles via serial to Arduino, which read them and passed them on to the servo motors via the Servo package in Arduino.
Challenges I ran into
It was my first time interfacing between Python and Arduino, so I had to learn how the serial transmission worked. Our Servos were limited to 180 degrees, so we had to do a little math to transform coordinates to fit to our servos. I could not get the GUI to cooperate with the Arduino serial transmission. Since the GUI is self contained, and the serial transmission requires an infinite loop, this proved to be quite challenging and I realized too late that this may have been the wrong approach.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I stuck with the serial transmission despite taking way too much time on it. I took the physics GRE yesterday and have been up for over 25 hours, but I stuck with it.
What I learned
What's next for Amateur Telescope Assistant
We plan to upgrade the user input, as well as make a serious upgrade to the hardware, to improve accuracy. In addition we plan to put a raspberry pi on it and make a self sufficient robot capable of retrieving location, weather (For refraction corrections), and direction.
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