virtual-telescope

This project is about constructing a virtual telescope based on the software Stellarium. We would like to develop a real hardware "telescope" to interface with the software. For more details, please check the description. Thank you

Description

This project is about constructing a virtual telescope. Stellarium.org is a well knows open source free planetarium software for your computer. It can show you the sky in details for any given time and location. Purchasing a "good" telescope is always a challenge. If you do not spend something around $10K, you are not going to get anything near as good to, let's say see the moons of Jupiter with high details. You need even more money to get more details, plus you need someone to guide you through the sky if you are a new in astrology. Long story short, we like to build a telescope which has an LCD screen in front of it and using the ocular you can see the contents displayed by the LCD screen. The using an IMU attached to the telescope and running stellarium on a computer, we would like to show you the view from the sky on the direction the telescope it targeting. The view of the sky will be see from the ocular of the telescope. Also, we like to add an encoder to allow the user to zoom in and out in order to increase the capability and immersion of the virtual telescope. A GPS module can be added to system in order to report the location as well as time to the software, stellarium for a more accurate simulation of the sky. We would like to write the interfacing software as a plug-in for stellarium. We are aiming to run stellarium on the Raspberry Pi as well.

Anyone is welcome to help with this project!

Ahmad Byagowi