Remotely-Controlled Low-Cost Digital Telescope
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4186/ej.2019.23.3.141Abstract
This paper presents a low-cost web controlled digital telescope which can benefit educational institutions. The system is composed of two webcams to acquire data. One is used as a wide field of view for localization purpose and the second one is used as a narrow field of view using a 40 cm focal length lens and an achromatic doublet to visualize celestial objects. The telescope orientation is performed remotely using two motors through Internet with an in-house developed soft- ware running on a Raspberry Pi 3 device. MQTT based server is used to provide a full wireless communication between the user and the telescope for orientation control, data visualization and acquisition. The telescope structure is built using a 3D-printer. An image processing algorithm is presented to calibrate mounting camera misalignment. The overlapping calibration is performed to localize the telescope image onto the large field-of-view image. It is based on Fourier domain cross-correlation technique.
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