House 4 Hack

Last time we went out to Golden Gate, Toby took his telescope with and it was lots of fun to look at constellations and planets and so on.  One issue is that it is quite tricky to setup the telescope pointing at something interesting and then get someone else to also see it.  So Toby suggested PiScope:

What is PiScope?

PiScope is a project we are busy with to do basic astrophotography using a RaspberryPi, PiCam and telescope.  When it is done we hope to have autotracking via OpenCV working and at the moment can jog, take photos etc.  It also has a neat little screen where everyone can see the object in question.

Lots of people pitched in to make this happen and was quite a fun project to work on – some woodwork, 3d design, printing, electronics, software all mixed together to make this work.

Want to build your own?

The 3d printed parts, code and so on is all on Github: https://github.com/tobykurien/pi-tracking-telescope

Here is the finished product:

We gave a talk at ScopeX 2015 and here is the presentation: http://www.house4hack.co.za/presentation/scopex/presentation/index.html