CTO

(Computerised Table Observatory)

My little, fully computerised Travell(&table)telescope

Everything started with an announcement in our Astroclub Newspaper.

An azimutal NexStar mounting (without telescope) was ocassionaly offered, because the owner was not satisfied with this part. He wanted to guide a camera. - Azimutal mounting ? The wrong choice for taking images ! You can only guide a little scope and make an astronomical object staying in your ocular! - Really?!  I didn't think so ! I bought  and did some modifications. At first I throw away the tripod. Then I build with some aluminium waste an equatorial wedge. The next step was to find the right firmwareupdate including equatorial featuers for the mounting. An old version of Sky Pro was installed to my notebook, a serial cabel for the connection to the handguider was found, and  together with the free accessable ASCOM framework and drivers my "CTO " was ready !

Some Pictures coming soon ........

The making of .........

In the future I will take some experiments with this equipment and I will show some images done with this little "Computerised Table Observatory"

A real "Beer-Table-Observatory"

A little Netbook, a  little ccd-cam (webcam), a DSLR piggypacked, a selfbuilt remote shutter cable, some software ......

..... and I can start getting astropicts !

Setting for Visual_Observing