Sauron is an open source project for converting your phone, camera, or telescope, into a robotic observatory system. Currently it's in a very early stage.

Our goal is to design an easy-to-build telescope mod kit for astrophotography fans. By leveraging state-of-art technologies, we don't need expensive hardware or a lot of manual works.

• Generic. Compatible to different telescope systems, even non-telescopes.
• Low cost. Reuse your existing devices. Much cheaper than commercial computerized telescope.
• High precision. Using sensors and computer vision to improve precision.
• Automatic. Almost no manual alignment required. It can automatically point to astronomical objects you select.
• Portable. Lightweight and robost architecture, you can move it to best observation locations.

To build a full robotic telescope system, you need components listed below. Items in italics is not a part of Sauron. If you alreay have some, just reuse them as much as possible.

• Altazimuth,
• 2 Servo motors, control altitude and azimuth
• 2 Gearboxes to transfer rotation from motors to altazimuth
• 9 axis sensor: accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetic field sensors
• A GPS module provides locations
• Arduino for driving the mount

TBD

• WiFi/bluetooth module?
• Support equatorial mount?

• A smart phone or a web camera
• A mount to attach phone to the telescope
• 5x zoom lens

• Main telescope
• Main camera, can be DSLR, or web camera
• Adapter to attach camera to telescope

• A PC, tablet, or phone. The finderscope and mount are connected to computer.

• Existing planetarium software, such as Stellarium
• A driver set between the mount and the software
  • Supports ASCOM interface
  • Sensor fusion for higher precision
  • Computer vision algorithms to do automatic calibration and alignment

As an open source project, Sauron benefits greatly from both the volunteer work of helpful developers and good bug reports made by users.

If you've noticed a bug or have an idea that you'd like to see come real, why not work on it? Bug reports and feature requests are typically submitted to the issue tracker https://github.com/gongminmin/Sauron/issues.

Remember the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings?