I’ve always wanted to be able to see galaxies and nebulas through my own telescope, but I have never managed to find one. Every time I set one up, I can find Jupiter, or whatever other planets that might be visible, and I can see a few of their moons, but that's usually just about it. No matter where else I look, I just find a few white dots, never a swirl, or a blob, or anything. (except for the moon, of course)

Anyway, even with the use of star charts, it’s always a pain to try and look for something you can’t see in the sky already. That’s why I want to motorize a telescope. Well, at least that’s one of the reasons.

I also want to be able to point a directional antenna at high altitude balloon payloads accurately and automatically, and it turns out that a motorized telescope mount is perfect for that. I also want to be able to photograph ships that are traveling up and down the California coast – which I can do from my apartment’s porch.

I’ve been borrowing and playing with other people’s telescopes here and there for the last few years. However, a few months ago, after moving to California, I bought one for $40 off of Craigslist. It’s an old Meade refractor, and it's in great shape. It even came with a whole slew of eye pieces. Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able to find anything more interesting than Jupiter in the night sky.

To solve this, I am in the process of creating stepper motor mounts that will bolt onto the telescope, and drive the right ascension and declination rings directly with tiny timing belts and timing gears.

To control these motors, I’m using an Arduino and 2 stepper motor drivers connected to a computer. My friend Onno is writing the firmware and software, and I am building the hardware and electronics.

So far we’ve managed to laser cut the motor mounts and get the motors attached to the telescope. We’ve also gotten the Arduino accepting commands from the PC to step motors in both directions. Now Onno is writing software to allow the popular astronomy program Stellarium to control the telescope. Of course, there is still much to be done. I still need to adjust the motors to reduce skipping, and enable micro-stepping. I also need to make the motors battery powered at some point.

You can see a few pictures here of the current state of the project.

Hopefully, we will soon have the telescope tracking stars within the movements of the night sky.

Of course, I did take a few more pictures. Here are the rest:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markstudios/sets/72157628330285445/