Controlling Smart Telescopes with OSS

Bypassing the Mobile Apps To Make Devices More Useful

If I look back over my entire 50 or so years as an Astronomy hobbiest, a really core activity for me has been automating telescopes so they can execute tasks for me in an unattended manner while I sleep. All the back to running astronomy software on my Apple IIe so I could get altitude and azimuth coordinates in the 80s, installing Mel Bartel’s ScopeDrive motor drive system on my first 13.1” Dobsonian in the 90s, all the way to my fully automated micro-observatory today.

A solution that’s simple and portable has been elusive. The new modern Smart Telescopes like the ZWO SeeStar S30 and S50, Dwarf, Vaonis Verspera, Celestron Origin etc. have started to realize that goal with cheap (in the ZWO and Dwarf lineups at least!), powerful, and portable automated telescopes. And in fact many of these devices run the same Open Source Software (OSS) I run in my micro-observatory.

ZWO Seestar S30

I pre-ordered as ZWO Seestar S30 to see if this tiny entry into the Smart Telescopes market would do the trick for me and received it last weekend. Since I have a trip down to Mexico coming up, getting something I could toss into a carryon was perfect so I could have a telescope to stick on my balcony. I won’t bother with a review of telescope itself, there are many on YouTube for you to enjoy. Once I tried out the basic functions of the telescope, the objective becomes: what else can I do with it?

The downside of these devices are they are intended for the mass market so they are controlled by relatively limited mobile applications. However, it soon became apparent to Kai Yung that an application could be built that could communicate directly with the device, in his case a SeeStar S50. The application became SeeStar ALP, a python app that allowed the user to control the S50 from a laptop or RPi, adding scheduling and mosaic functionality as well as making it easier to operate the camera in polar mode (as opposed to AltAz) so images aren’t subject to field rotation.

Setting the software up in Linux is pretty easy. The automated install script targets the Raspberry Pi so minor changes need to be made to remove a check for platform. The installation is:

mkdir Projects
cd Projects
git clone https://github.com/smart-underworld/seestar_alp.git
cd seestar_alp/raspberry_pi
nano setup.sh

The code checks for an existing seestar_alp directory in your user root so put the code in a sub-directory. Remove the code in the script that says:

  if [ "$(arch)" != "aarch64" ]; then
    echo "ERROR: Unsupported architecture. Please ensure you are running the 64bit raspberry pi OS"
    exit 255
  fi

This should allow the script to run on any Debian/Ubuntu Linux machine.

The setup script will install the software and two services, one for SeeStar ALP and one for a partial INDI driver that allows you to control the scope from Stellarium.

Once the software is installed connect your browser to http://localhost:5432/ to load the user interface.

Next time, using the S30 in polar mode (with a 3D printed wedge) with the SeeStar ALP software. Also, a new INDI driver for the S30 that allows you to use it with standard INDI clients. Stay tuned!