Telescope Over the Internet - Introduction

Telescope over the Internet was a product developed as a final year project for BSc Engineering Course of University of Moratuwa, Faculty of Engineering, for the Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering Department, by group No 14 from the batch of 2005/2006

An Introduction about this project is provided below

Telescope over the Internet is novel in the aspect that it will be the first telescope in Sri Lanka which can be accessed by the general public over the internet. The system involves automation of a manual 8” Schmidt Cassegran 2110 mm telescope into a fully automated telescope which can be controlled through the internet to focus at the celestial bodies and download pictures using the SBIG ST – 7E CCD camera attached to it. The user will be able to enter the celestial coordinates of any celestial object in our web interface and download real-time CCD images over the internet.

High resolution stepper motors and gear systems give the telescope a resolution of 1.8 arcsec. Users can either enter the celestial coordinates of the objects they wish to observe or they can select any object from our database for which the ephemerides will be automatically calculated. Celestial to equatorial conversion algorithm has been implemented in the client side and the resultant equatorial coordinates are passed to the local dedicated server located at the telescope site. The server runs two simultaneous programs

(1) Telescope Controller

(2) CCD controller

 The server side Telescope Controller program extracts the last focused coordinates of the telescope, compensates for earth synchronous motors and calculates the angle for both axes to turn further. This result is passed to the main controller board in the telescope. After processing the motor movement commands are sent to both the motor controller boards.

After the telescope movement completes, the user establishes connection to our local ST7 CCD camera through our server side CCD controller program, sets exposure time and downloads the image to his machine.

User also has the privilege of manual fine tuning the telescope to bring the object within the center of field of view. Earth synchronous motors (The third motor set) fixed to the HA axis, compensates for the earth movement, so that an object remains within the field of view despite earth’s rotation.

Web based control of a telescope and CCD camera with high precision is the key part of this project.


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