Thursday August 6 2020 Log

This not-fully-autonomous or remote Celestron rig is difficult to manage in 115-deg. heat and
will be put on hold as a new system will be introduced.

Thursday August 6 2020 Log
Massive Telescope Challenges
The Typhoon has passed the Pacific Ocean and moved into China where its causing damage. My sky is filled with multi-level clouds and haze, and a mix of several different cloud types. The wind is gone. Gradually the sky is beginning to clear a bit. Last night I could see Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon about a day from full, and in the morning, Venus. With a working telescope system already set up, it may be possible to shoot through cloud holes to image these objects during short periods of time. But that won't happen anytime soon.

Now we get to the massive attention with Celestron mounts and telescopes. The days and nights are far too hot, 115 deg. F. today, to play around endlessly with a finicky rig of the highest learning curve during the onslaught of heat stroke. Investing US $20,000.00, it was believed the mount and telescope, could for the most part, align and calibrate itself. This is absolutely not the case. Not even the so called Celestron StarSense can satisfy this criterion. Living in a modern day and age when other telescopes can align themselves, Celestron has completely missed the target and remains in the archaic past with calibration. With other digital telescopes, you don't need to do the nasty polar alignment, or try to get any decent alignment of accuracy using 3 and 4 stars manual alignment.

Aside from the heat and humidity, and being sick for 3 days after every bout of heat stroke, there is blockage of the night sky by the roof, and balcony sides, at maybe 40% clearance, plus a Bortle 9.9 light polluted sky where only one star is usually seen. North is not visible. Celestron wants to find stars on the other side of the skyscraper for calibration, or stars blocked by the roof and side walls - a complete impossibility. Arduous manual alignment is sketchy at best and you really don't want to spend any time outdoors due to heat, humidity and poisonous air pollution wafted across the ocean from China. Unfortunately the promises of remote observing by Celestron did not come to fruition after two-plus years of struggling with the systems.

It is at this time I will invest in a new telescope system that is truly remote and gives the typical results of a one-meter primary reflector, where practically all functions of the telescope are autonomous and I can stay indoors under the air conditioner and use a working visual GOTO system with my computer systems and WiFi. The system will also shoot through light pollution and make corrections using autonomous software. In 2 weeks, the ball should be rolling on this new system and I plan to report the results in a new blog section. Stay tuned!

Otis Robotic Cyber Space Telescope

Online Otis Robotic Cyber Space Telescope

I'm working on restoring the original remote Otis Robotic Cyber Space GOTO Telescope which operated by internet on the full number of Messier objects plus some selected objects like the Horsehead Nebula.

The original GOTO telescope was programmed by Mike Otis in HTML and included the ability to image the night sky from anywhere in the world, with a good internet connection. It included a sky computer with star maps for all available sky objects with its capabilities. It held a database for accessing objects with both coordinates and data. A weather radar scanned the skies. A page detailed programming, operations, and a photo of the telescope. One page covered methods for going online with other telescopes and links were provided for programming your own remote telescope. Imaging took place with a choice of two imaging cameras, a black & white SBIG ST4 and a color Connectix. The telescope observatory was maintained by mobile robot droids that tasked the mini observatory opening and closing, camera choices and parameters such as oculars. The best features of the ORCST was its fast response time, the ability to capture and present an image in real time, and capability to image all Messier objects plus a few selected objects like the Horsehead Nebula. When one hemisphere telescope was under cloudy skies or busy, the other hemisphere telescope could take over. The telescope also had a novel hidden "land mode" for camera testing. The internet telescope was popular with schools, universities, observatories and was used by professional and amateur astronomers.