aqanoq-el-universo-en-tus-manos-
It is a virtual astronomical observatory. Any person from his smartphone or computer can control the motion of a telescope, select stars and planets from a catalog, introduce coordinates, take pictures of an astronomical object and adjust the focus of the image. In the webpage there is a streaming and from it, the user decides how to move the telescope and improve the quality of the image.This project is solving the Robotic Observatory challenge. Description
The goal is that anyone, anywhere in the world, who is curious and doesn´t have access to the minimum hardware to explore the outer space, could do it through this app. We built an open platform to reach this kind of people. Hacking a destroyed telescope, we built our electronic and adapted it to that telescope to find every celestial body, just giving to it the coordinates, either for an equatorial mount or for an altazimuth mount. Also we developed the software needed to give access through the web to each person in the world who wants to use our telescope placed here, in Guatemala by us.
Using the camera of an android phone, we take images from the telescope and stream them to a web server mounted in a Raspberry Pi. Also the sensors were useful to align the telescope to the north of the earth, as a reference to track the stars. The Raspberry Pi also was an intermediary between the phone an the arduino controlling the mechanics of the telescope. We programmed the arduino UNO to read an encoder to get the exact position of the telescope and using a close loop we set it to the right coordinate. This was posible converting the equatorial coordinates to altazimuth coordintes using our position and sideral time.
The main objective of our project is to awake the interest in the space of the people who have restraints to explore it.
Project Information
License: Academic Free License 3.0 (AFL-3.0)
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/rolivajr/aqanoq