Design on small robotic and remotely controlled observatory

[shahgazer]

Greetings eveyone,

I am searching for some concept design of a small robotic observatory and able to remotely controlled.

A similar design was like the one at Hanna City Robotic Observatory (http://www.mtco.com/%7Ejgunn/)

Not planning to fit myself in, just enough room for the telescope, ccds, a computer etc etc. More like a mini-observatory excluding any intervention by human.

I tried contacting Jerry Gunn of Hanna City Robotic Obs some weeks back, but no reply yet. I wonder if he's still in charge of the program.

Does anyone know if such design is being deployed elsewhere? :help:

Many thanks...

[jase]

Hi Shah,
There are quite a few options available for robotic observatories. Much of the decision obviously comes back to the size of the instrument you intend to put in the observatory. From a software perspective, Bob Denny takes a lot of credit. He is the founder/developer of ASCOM (http://ascom-standards.org/), a universal driver library for hardware and an common interface for other programs to interact with. Without this, it makes robotic operation difficult to say the least.

From some further info on robotic observatories and software, please check out these links.
http://www.robosky.com/index.php
http://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/observatory/roboscope/
http://www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov/
http://www.nelsonbay.com/~gc/observatory_files/Page1808.htm
http://www.astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~hessman/MONET/links.html
http://hou.lbl.gov/rtml/
http://www.astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~hessman/RTML/

Weather stations are also important (certainly if you're not about to monitor the environment), but there are some major advancements in these also. http://www.cyanogen.com/products/cloud_main.htm.

[LeoLion]

Hi Shah , My first post to the antipodes !! Our University of Durham has a student robotic facility that you may find of interest. A series of links to various control options are in there . The link is :-
http://www.dur.ac.uk/john.lucey/astrolab/draco/roboscope.html
Hope this helps,
Len Entwisle (LeoLion)

[jase]

:welcome: LeoLion to the IIS team. Thats are really cool robotic observatory. How is telescope time allocated? Do you need to put forward a research proposal?

[LeoLion]

Hi again Shah . It would look to be kit for third year undergrads on Physics /Astronomy courses. The University of Bradford (UK) operates a robotic observatory set up on Tenerife which you can use for free (!!) http://www.telescope.org/ . Some technical documents and software (Open Source) are promised . An earlier incarnation of this Robotic unit used to run on my local moorland http://www.telescope.org/oxenhope-site.php . This unit was taken out by a lightning zap writing off ageing PCs .
Len Entwisle (LeoLion)

[shahgazer]

Hi Len,

That was a really impressive setup. :thumbsup: Simple yet effective. Somewhat similar like the one in Hanna City Obs. I can see the dome is just housing the main scope. I believe the application server is placed inside the main building? And I can see the cables/wires being channeled through into the roof...

How long is the duration of the project? I was thinking to minimize some cost on the dome. Rather than getting one like RoboDome, I'd like to design a more traditional roof top, like Hanna City style. But then, I need to consider writing some control software for it.. :doh:

Hi Jase,

Thanks for the list of resources. Helps me a lot! I wonder if we have some similar drivers like ASCOM running on Linux-based PC? :confuse3:

Kind regards,

[jase]

For ASCOM, no. Most of ASCOM was compile in C and .Net. I'm not aware of any code ports to Linux. You could potentially use WINE (Windows Emulator) - http://www.faqs.org/faqs/windows-emulation/wine-faq/ but there are no guarantees.

On the linux platform, I suggest you check out Audela - http://software.audela.free.fr/english.htm. I have no experience with WINE or Audela, but plenty with ASCOM so can't tell you much more.

Hope this helps