Since i was a child, I used to watch night sky and constallation. It is one of my hobby. When i was in high school, I lived in upstate New York. The nights of upstate New York were always filled with bright stars. As a enthusiastic star-gazer, this was another blessing from heaven. For my presentation, I initially attempted to associate my fervor for star-gazing with coding; yet, when I dug more deeper into these fields, I rather found out a more interesting instrument: the telescope-controller.
Arduino is just an easy to program hardware and you can attach motor to it and control it with codes.
Arduino reads the Constellation map
And gathers latitude longitude, and time information and accordingly turns the motor to adjust the telescope and have it follow Constellation near by.
Top is the board for Arduino where you can attach motors and other sensors. Bottom is where you can program to receive input and create output through programming.
This seems like a very user-friendly and intuitive system to interact with a telescope! I have a notion that it is pretty intimidating to operate a telescope for many people in general outside of the profession or the knowledge of astronomy and star gazing, but this makes things so much easier. Can Arduino be used in other hardware as well to perform simple yet useful interactivity? The small board reminds me of a Raspberry Pi.
It’s really interesting how you can use an Arduino to control a telescope and actually have it follow the paths of nearby constellations. I also really enjoyed the pictures that you added along with the post to illustrate the connection to coding.
I really like how this tool makes looking at stars even easier; rather than looking for a particular constellation, it seems that a user can plug in coordinates or where they want to look and have the telescope move. I’m curious to know what language the Arduino uses; the picture you used looks similar to processing.
Looking into space has always been a great hobby for humans, especially for the past few thousand years. The user interface seems to be real simple which makes using an advanced telescope much less intimidating.
This post is really close to my childhood as my dad owned a telescope the had to be controlled from his computer so I really love this topic. I want to ask if this is a downsizing of the motor programs used on other telescopes and if so is it re-programmable?
Stargazing is one of my favorite things to do, even if I rarely get the chance to do it. This seems like a pretty great interface to view the stars. I was wondering if anything like this exists for regular cameras?
This makes stargazing so much easier! I wonder how the app works and what its code is like. I’m also interested in how the pieces all fit together; the videos shows a little bit of how the phone is used to control the telescope, but I wonder how each device connects to one another.
I like how you connected something you personally enjoy to this project. I bet the people who developed and created Arduino are like you, having a genuine interest in star gazing. The process of digitizing something super natural is interesting, and this shows how computers are getting more capable. I would like to check Arduino out and see in detail how it works.
This is awesome becomes im learning to use audrino soon so it is awesome to see one of the cool things it can do. I really enjoyed the pictures as well.
Stargazing is a super fun activity, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to look, or what stars you’re actually looking at. Arduino is a cool solution to this problem, and it’s awesome that it uses code to find and follow the nearest constellations. I wonder what the code for this program looks like, and how it connects with the motor.
Astronomy and coding/electronics seem to go hand in hand sometimes. There are a number of ways to think about connecting this to what we’re doing in class, from using photos of the sky to controlling the telescope with a processing or p5 sketch. How else could you incorporate what we’ve done in class with this?
I’ve only worked with Arduino once but the way that it was used to give the telescope a set of instructions based on code shows us how easy it is for the everyday person to play a role in the development of future technology.
This is a really cool use of arduino SangDoo. I’ve been meaning to learn how to program those for a few years and this just brought that desire back to the surface. Cool find and thanks for sharing! I’ll be honest I didn’t know so many people were interested in stargazing, but reading through the comments it looks like a lot of people in our class enjoy stargazing!