Since the Earth rotates, stars in the sky move so the telescope must continually update its position to keep the object in the eyepiece. This telescope, despite what the instruction manual says, does not have tracking either.
It is a cool concept, but when you want to enjoy the peace and quiet stargazing, it’s incredibly annoying. The hand controller also has a small speaker with voice recordings that give information about the observed object. Imagine trying to drive a car if the accelerator was a ON-OFF switch rather than a continuously variable pedal – it’s either flooring it or nothing at all. This makes it near-on impossible to manually position the telescope to a specific object in the sky if the automated movement is inaccurate. However, for some reason on this telescope, it ramps the motors to full speed whenever one of the buttons are pressed. On GoTo telescopes, there are four cardinal direction buttons on the controller that allows the user to move the motors on a desired axis. The hand controller it came with resembles a mobile phone from the mid-1990s and is comparably frustrating to use. However, the telescope we picked up was by no means perfect. It’s great for beginners because it only takes some very basic astronomical knowledge to get started with observing Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings and the wonderful glow of bright nebulae like the Orion Nebula. This saves the hassle of trying to manually mess about with knobs and instead will move the telescope to precise positions at the press of a button. It has a set of motors that, when requested by a hand controller, will ‘slew’ to any object in the sky. This telescope, in particular, is a GoTo model. This project started a couple of months back when we found a cheap telescope on Gumtree (for our overseas readers, an Australian website for second-hand goods) for a modest $200. Reverse engineering, tinkering, hacking, whatever you want to call it – the process of modifying something that isn’t exactly how you want it is one of the benefits of learning electronics! While designing and assembling projects from scratch is usually what we do at DIYODE, some find it more fun to improve existing products. In the age where DIY electronic parts are cheaper than ever, it’s no surprise that makers are finding more creative ways to add more features and convenience to their favourite household gadgets. We show you how to reverse engineer a cheap GoTo telescope so that you can add automation using an Arduino.
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