the interface on top of an image acquired with the guiding solution

I have the following problem at home: the balcony is small, the tube is big and I am lazy. This sums up to a constant problem of drifting, the planet or lunar surface being imaged slowly walks away. Though there are methods to polar align a mount even when there is no way to see the north pole, the small balcony part means frequent small bumps into the whole thing. The oversized scope is also prone to accidents. I also tried the feature tracker in Sharpcap, failed, and the autoguiding of PHD2, failed. So I came up with the soapbox ensemble. I call it noszogtató in Hungarian, for it means something like nagger-pusher-convincer. It got itself a soapbox, literally.

Contents

• rationale
• block diagram
• communication
• desktop app
• arduino code
• hardware
• conclusions, photos

(tovább…)