Are you curious of the whereabouts of IRIDIUM, ENVISAT, and LACROSS? Are you wary of HELIOS, CFESAT, ESSAIM and - yes - US193?
Do you wonder what all those satellites are doing, circling above us incessantly? Then you are a closet satellite peeper and Autolino (Automating Little Nighttime Obsessions) is for you.
Autolino allows the lazy but satellite-obsessed to set up a telescope with a camera to scan the skies at night for orbiting spacecraft.
An offshoot of the MakeLanguage project, part III – Autowow, Autolino uses opensource software and mostly cheap hardware to open the sky to your little
obsessions. Oh yes, you do need a little patience in setting things up and getting all the parts to work; well worth the effort, however.
As the satellite voyeur you are, I hardly need to convince you of that.
The boxes to the right contain all the information you need to get started: Gathering satellite trajectories from the internet,
calculating the position of satellites in the night sky, controlling a hobbyist telescope (I use the LX200 series), moving the telescope into position to catch a satellite,
capturing images of the sky when the satellite transitions, processing the images and storing them to disk.
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CURRENT PROJECTS : Automating Little Nighttime Obsessions
