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none wrote:
I have recently decided to build a telescope, that is controlled by an
old laptop I have.
The idea is to eventually have the device hooked up to a website so
people (from a different hemisphere, or just ones without a telescope)
can login and browse the sky down here; plus it will keep me entertained
while I build it! :P
Since I have basically no knowledge of astronomy or telescopes please
forgive my ignorance.
I'm a programmer and enjoy playing around with electronics so I figured
hooking something like this up would be hours of fun and be a nice way
to enter the astronomy field as a hobby.
So far I have been browsing the web and found many great sites with some
fairly good information on construction of both the telescope and the
electronics.
The only question I haven't been able to find an answer to is one about
focusing.
For a wide field view starfield at short focal length you can probably
get away without refocussing, but at modest to high magnification the
focal plane will drift sufficiently with ambient temperature that you
will need to refocus from time to time. And again at higher
magnifications small geometrical distortions of the scope frame under
gravity (and or mirror slop on some SCTs) can shift the focus too.
I will have the Telescope hooked up to a small camera (model yet to be
decided on so any suggestions welcome!). Will there be a need to refocus
if I move from one location in the sky to another? I have had
conflicting answers to this, and it seriouly affects some of my design
decisions.
I'd have a servo for focussing. You will regret not having one...
Does anyone have any suggestions or links to sites on how to hook a
camera to a telescope?
sci.astro.ccd-imaging
ToUCam Pro's are popular try looking for the QUIAG (sp?) group pages.
Any information that you can give on this project will be most appreciated.
Thanks to all in advance!
Good luck! It is harder to do than it sounds.
Regards,
Martin Brown
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