brainwagon

Since I stopped actively working on building telescopes, there have been numerous bits of technology that are now widely and cheaply available, and that can be used to implement new, interesting functionality. In particular I hadn’t considered that the same kind of sensors which are used to control quadcopters could be used to determine the position and orientation of a telescope tube. You could plunk the telescope down in any position, in any orientation, and it would be able to use the GPS, gyro, accelerometer and magnetometers to determine where the scope is, what time it is, and where it is pointed. While the overall accuracy might be a little low, it probably can point to within the low power field of a typical telescope.

I’m not the first to think of it. I got the idea from here.

I’ll leave this idea percolating in the back of my head. Worthy of experimentation.