An off-the-shelf guider for the Palomar 200-inch telescope: interfacing amateur astronomy software with professional telescopes for an easy life

Fraser Clarke; James Lynn; Niranjan Thatte; Matthias Tecza

doi:10.1117/12.2054884

28 July 2014 An off-the-shelf guider for the Palomar 200-inch telescope: interfacing amateur astronomy software with professional telescopes for an easy life

Fraser Clarke, James Lynn, Niranjan Thatte, Matthias Tecza

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V; 91472G (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054884
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

We have developed a simple but effective guider for use with the Oxford-SWIFT integral field spectrograph on the Palomar 200-inch telescope. The guider uses mainly off-the-shelf components, including commercial amateur astronomy software to interface with the CCD camera, calculating guiding corrections, and send guide commands to the telescope. The only custom piece of software is an driver to provide an interface between the Palomar telescope control system and the industry standard 'ASCOM' system. Using existing commercial software provided a very cheap guider (<$5000) with minimal (<15 minutes) commissioning time. The final system provides sub-arcsecond guiding, and could easily be adapted to any other professional telescope

Citation Download Citation

Fraser Clarke, James Lynn, Niranjan Thatte, and Matthias Tecza "An off-the-shelf guider for the Palomar 200-inch telescope: interfacing amateur astronomy software with professional telescopes for an easy life", Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 91472G (28 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054884

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