Quote:
Originally Posted by Kvl
Hi Barry,
Thanks for the reply.
Does Stellarium need a driver for the HEQ5 mount?
I assumed (always dangerous) that I could replace the SynScan hand controller with my laptop/notepad computer.
The plan was to use ASCOM for the telescope contol, Stellarium for the pretty picture/GUI to see what it thinks that the telescope is doing and Stellariumscope as the interface between the two.
As I said in my earlier post, all appears fine except for manual E/W slewing controlled by the ASCOM interface which is annoying but I can live without.
The automatic tracking appears fine (inside the house!). I am just waiting for a clear night to do a field test.
Reading the various threads in this and other forums shows that others are going down the same track with mixed results depending on the various software versions.
Are Stellarium developing their own control suite for the HEQ5 right now?
Can I add the display of transit times to the Stellarium wish list as this is a very useful feature for me?
Can I add another request for Stellarium, the logging of the telescope position to disk via a configurable interface or would this be better done via ASCOM or should I have a crack at it myself?
Karl.
PS Looks like ASCOM already have a logging feature
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Hi Karl
Stellarium only has two telescope drivers directly available. One for the Celestron Nextstar and one for Meade Autostar/LX200 which also suits the Losmandy Gemini system. There is a third in the source code that will control a specic remote telescope (I think it is the Mt Wilson telescope)but it has not been compiled for Windows.
Someone did write an interface for the ASCOM system but it is not part of the stellarium project. This will allow any of the ASCOM drivers to be used with Stellarium. Particularly the Stellariumscope which I believe has handbox simulation as well. However Stellarium only reads the scope position and displays it in stellarium or extracts the current selected position and sends these coords to the telescope along with a slew to command.
At the moment the standard telescope control has been integrated into the latest svn source code but unless someone decides to write some code for other telescopes and functions it will not be done in the immediate future. There are basic instructions for this in the wiki.
Please put in a request for the other items you would like. I think there are already some requests for these items. The main problem is that the programmers are working in other areas in an endeavour to get the program to the release of version 1.0.0 as soon as possible. This has been delayed due to the immense task of re-writing the existing source code to suit the Qt system so that future additions can be more easily added.
Barry
