Stellarium

Network Telescope Control How-To

Asked by Jorge Carrillo

Trying to control a Celestron telescope connected by USB port to another computer on the TCP/IP network. A Python program on remote computer listens on a port and sends whatever it receives from the local computer to the tty the telesccope is connected to. The Python program has a spy option which I've turned on. Using this on the remote computer I can see the command Stellarium is sending to the port on the remote computer. For some reason I thought (or maybe hoped) it would be a Celestron command. I had configured the device settings for the scope in Stellarium as Celestron NexStar. Now I believe this is a Stellarium command. My questions: (1) is there a way to have Stellarium send a Celestron command to the remote computer? or (2) where is this Stellarium protocol documented?

Thanks in advance for your help. Stellarium is great and works fine when the scope is connected directly.

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

1) No, it's not possible. The "network" option uses Stellarium's own protocol for communication over TCP/IP.

2) In a file in Stellarium's old Subversion repository at SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/telescope_server/stellarium_telescope_protocol.txt

That whole directory also contains the code of stand-alone executables that serve as telescope drivers/network servers (look in the "src" subdirectory):
http://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/telescope_server/

For example, in your case, the remote computer needs to be running the "TelescopeServerNexStar" executable.

There are somewhat outdated instructions for using the stand-alone telescope servers on the Stellarium wiki:
http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Telescope_Control_%28client-server%29

Pay no attention to the instructions for the Stellarium side - that functionality has been superseded by the Telescope Control plug-in.

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