Daggerstab

The original stellarium telescope interface using a socket connection for external drivers to pick up on seemed to me to be the ideal solution. Yes, you would still be reliant on likes of stellariumscope to actually do the scope control but it keeps the platform specific stuff out of stellarium. All stellarium ever needed to do was provide extensions to the socket interface for the likes of sync, stop, track, park etc. and provide a user interface to support them. I'm sure plenty of folks would have come out of the woodwork to write drivers for all the scope types out there - just as they did with stellariumscope.

Chris.

The "original" interface is still in use. I haven't integrated my code yet. For the last several years, I haven't noticed anyone coming out of the woodwork to offer new drivers or an extension of the basic protocol. What I've noticed is a lot of users asking "why don't you support telescope X" or "why it can only slew to objects" or "why do I need to use StellariumScope". Do you really think that starting a separate driver executable from a command-line console is user-friendly?

The reply from Alexander Wolf was...

Bogdan works for INDI and ASCOM interfaces within Stellarium.

The reply was in relation to my post on the 13th Feb in the thread http://sourceforge.n...hread/f85ed4a2/

At first I thought that Bogdan was a particular plug-in I needed to get, only after reading a bit more via Google I found out it was a person.

Innapropriate tense and preposition - "works for" should have been "is working on". I also find it hard to communicate with Alex sometimes, as my English is much better than my Russian. And yes, I am Bogdan Marinov.

Hello,

I have been given a one line reply by Alexander Wolf of Stellarium that the new interface written by Bogdan Marinov in Stellarium 12 can now work with ASCOM devices without needing StellariumScope. That's all I got.

I have looked for more details but can not find any, even the Stellarium Wiki is quite a few months out of date.

When was that and what did he said exactly? No ASCOM code has been released with 0.12.0. I know because it's still collecting dust in my branch...

And I'm really sorry about the state of the Wiki article. When I have time for Stellarium, it's spent writing code or answering users (like here), not documentation.

Status update on the ASCOM code: I have some basic functionality, but my involvement with Stellarium is hampered by lack of free time, not-powerful-enough computer and really slow Internet. (I would upload a test build with the new telescope control plug-in, but it would take me an hour to upload a 50 MB installer, and connection instability pretty much guarantees that it won't finish it in that time.)

I wonder just how much ASCOM/telescope control functionality they've actually put in - Hopefully in supporting ASCOM they've gone beyond then minimum level of issuing gotos and reading position - EQMOD user's need that sync command and unless its there folks will still most likely need stellariumscope. Also stellariumscope resolves some of the J2000/JNOW issues that stellarium's standard telescope control introduced (though I think the plugin may already now have options for this?).

It's slew/stop/sync at the moment, as far as I can remember. The intention was at least to make StellariumScope unnecessary.

I wonder just how difficult it is to put ASCOM connectivity into Stellarium, they are obviously very talented programmers but can not under why they build a beautiful planetarium software but then only put a very limited amount of telescope control.

First: Stellarium being a FOSS project driven by volunteers, "they" are not a monolith. People come and go, and they have different fields of expertise or foci of interest, and there are people who contribute code based on purposes they want to use Stellarium for. The original author was into 3D graphics and wanted to make a realistic representation of the sky. Telescope control was added later by another person. Then I came and made a GUI for the telescope control. And the time I could afford to spend on Stellarium has varied vastly over the last few years.

As for ASCOM itself, the problem is that it is based on a Microsoft technology - COM - that is available only on Windows. Stellarium is multi-platform and the framework on which it's based (Qt + MinGW on Windows) does not use COM. There's a way to interface COM objects like ASCOM drivers with Qt, but it's unpleasant and time-consuming. For me, it's also really hard to test - I don't have a telescope and using simulators is a bit taxing for my computer (netbook + Windows 7 + Stellarium = more choppy than a cheesy martial arts movie).

Another part of the explanation for the delay is that the code infrastructure was originally made only for one telescope control protocol - Stellarium's - and the target is to support three - Stellarium's, ASCOM and INDI. This requires re-writing some of it, and I've been stopped in mid-rewrite several times now. As a result, the code is a mess at the moment.

I have overhauled the telescope control pages in the Stellarium Wiki, they might be worth a look:

Telescope Control - Stellarium

This guy has written an instruction on using Stellarium, StellariumScope and ASCOM to drive HEQ5/EQ6 equatorial mounts:

Stellarium Telescope Control with a HEQ5/EQ6 - IceInSpace

Hi,

I have just downloaded the latest version of Stellarium, and I have now managed to get it to work with my Explorer 130P.

Martin

Skywatcher Explorer 130P SynScan AZ GOTO

Helios 10 x 50 bins

Meade ETX-60AT

Should I add it to the list of supported devices?