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Hi Sophie
Your particular telescope mount is a physical instrument which has certain mechanical characteristics. Meade is different to Skywatcher, is different to Celestron, is different to Takahashi, is different to Vixen, etc.
A planetarium program is a software application that (in theory) can command a mount to perform certain functions, such as aligning on a star, doing a GoTo, finding a galaxy, etc. provided it can “understand” and “communicate” with the mount.
To do this successfully, most mounts come with a “Driver” from the manufacturer of the mount which defines and controls how the mount will behave when under the control of a planetarium program.
There are many telescope mount manufacturers and each has their own design. There are also several planetarium programs and each one of these has their own design and way in which it interacts with a physical mount.
To help standardise on the interface between mounts from various suppliers and software programs from various authors, there is an independent software “interface” called ASCOM.
It is my understanding that:
a) if the designer/manufacturer of a mount designs their mount with an ASCOM driver and provides this to you and,
b) the software author designs their planetarium program to operate in accordance with the ASCOM standards,
then in theory (provided you have the correct telescope interface cable) all you need to do is configure the planetarium software by selecting your telescope mount from a drop down list and perhaps set a few parameters and then you should be able to make a connection between your mount and the planetarium program and go from there.
Have a look at your mount manual to see if it mentions an ASCOM driver.
Cheers
Dennis
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