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Project MK8: Radio Telescope Pointing software

Here is a pointing/tracking script to steer and track celestial objects. The target you have to select can be the sun, the moon, jupiter, other planets or a well known star. When running the script,it sends every second the azimuth and altutude angle of the target to a communication port of the PC. The date and the time is retrieved from the PC. Your motor controller has to convert the the angle data to a speed of the motors. Further you have to fill in your longitude and latitude location.

The in-accuracy is smaller than 1 arc second; this is 0.00027 degrees. Even milli-arcsecond accuracy is claimed when compared to the Naval Observatory's NOVAS library!see https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/pyephem/issues/7

Every second new pointing values are given, but you can change that to some other interval.

The script is written in Python-xy and can be found here https://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/wiki/Downloads.

Included is the an editor called "spider". Programming is like "Basic" in old times. Further you have to add/run the module called pyephem -3.7.5.3.win32-py2.7.exe (md5) from here; https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyephem/

Finally add the serial module pyserial -2.7.win32_py3k.exe from here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyserial/files/pyserial/2.7/

This script is here:ephem11, and lookes like this:

Fig.1 - Python Ephem.

If your controller wants to see a different format then you can change that in the script.

To test it you use two PC's; one with this program running and via a so called zero modem cable the signal goes to the second PC. (Via a null modem cable the send pins from PC1 are connected to the receive pins of PC2 and vice versa; easy to make yourself, google it.) On this second PC you run Hyperterminal with the right settings for instance; 9600 b/s, 8 databits, 1 stopbit, parity; none, flowcontrol; none.

The output looks like this;

Fig.2 - Hyperterminal sample output.

Michiel Klaassen october 2014