Automating the SWOSU Observatory

Abstract

Recent, low-cost, high-quality astronomical cameras have made it possible for us to use SWOSU’s 16 inch Ritchey-Cretien telescope to take very high quality images of faint astronomical objects like distant galaxies and nebulae. One challenge we have faced in this astrophotography is that these images often require long exposure times, as much as several hours. During this time the Earth is rotating so the telescope has to track its target across the sky over the course of the night. The SWOSU Observatory, which houses our telescope, consists of a 15-foot diameter dome with a closable slot the telescope looks through. So as the telescope tracks a target across the sky, the slot must be regularly adjusted (usually every several minutes) to keep the telescope looking through the slot. This part of the process is very tedious, particularly in the wee hours of the morning. In this work we use microcontrollers to allow the software that controls the direction the telescope is aimed to also correctly position the dome so that the astronomer doesn’t have to.