First attempt at astrophotography, and getting into the project

After getting into this project a little further, I have decided to first get everything to work with manual control. By that I mean I will be able to read the sensor data to see the position of the telescope, and control the motors manually through the raspberry pi. Once this is complete, then I will start automating the motor control and set up procedures.

I have figured out a few things now. It looks like I am going to have to do two conversions for each line read in by my sensors. Conversion one will be to convert the Euler angles to the Alt/Az coordinates which isn't that hard to calculate. The second conversion will be from the Alt/Az coordinates to Equatorial coordinates which is also fairly straightforward. I am hoping the raspberry pi will be able to do this fast enough it can handle doing it each time a line is read from the sensors.

I am now able to read in the sensor data directly into a java program using the RXTX library. This was a little complicated to setup because I am using a 64 bit version of Ubuntu to program in, but I tried using the latest (not the latest stable) build of it and it works fine. I did have to go into the project properties and remove and then re-add the system JRE to the project in order to solve some problems.

On a side note, this past weekend I tested out my new camera adapter for my telescope (here it is on amazon). It allows you to take pictures through your telescope by mounting your point and shoot camera to the adapter, and then mounting the adapter to your eyepiece. The camera looks through an eyepiece, which isn't ideal. You can see the results of my first try in the pictures section or by clicking here. After taking all of these pictures, I kind a little excited and decided to take it a step further. So I ordered a Canon EOS Rebel T3 DSLR with some accessories that will allow me to directly connect the camera to the telescope without using an eyepiece. This is a much better way to take pictures with your telescope. One of the main concerns I had while doing research for what I would need is that there are issues with telescopes like mine (a Newtonian). Basically, where the eyepieces go is the focal point of the telescope. Now if you replace the eyepiece with a DSLR, the focuser will have to be moved in quite a bit more to be in focus. The problem is that most Newtonians have focusers that cannot go far enough in to compensate for this. I was very lucky with mine as it was made with this in mind. On mine, you can actually remove the part of the focuser where the eyepiece goes, and there is a T-adapter build in to it. The part that was removed is big enough that it allows the scope to be focused when a DSLR is used with it. Check back on the pictures section next week. Hopefully I'll be able to take some pictures with my new camera as long as it's not too cloudy (though I will still try even if I can see just a little part of the sky).