Can't lock telescope tracking to a satellite

Bug #1019426 reported by Howard Shaw
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Stellarium
Fix Released
Wishlist
Petr Kubánek

Bug Description

This is a wishlist item, not really a bug but I can only see how to submit bugs.
After configuring the satellites plugin a satellite can be located and held at screen centre with the Search window (F3) and space bar. I want to slew my telescope to the satellite and follow it but CRTL+n or ALT+n takes the telescope to the location of the satellite at the instant the command was given, but do not track as the satellite moves. My drive can certainly keep up with a satellite and it would be fun to photograph ISS or HST which have a well defined shape.

Changed in stellarium:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
tags: added: telescope-control
Revision history for this message
Tomas (tomas-it-gmail) wrote :

Bogdan,
I was trying to track the satellites using virtual telescope and have same issue as Howard. I have looked at the plugin wiki page and there's a note saying that tracking satellites is unsupported and tracking planets is not advised.

I'm not a programmer, but I looked at the code and TelescopeControl::slewTelescopeToSelectedObject() which gets called when ctrl+{1-9} is pressed does the job pretty well (I also tried pressing ctrl+1 few times to trigger the event and it seemed to work). If I understand correctly when telescope is moved to a selected object it doesn't track it, rather just sits in the sky (although it moves with the planets and the moon, but gets out of sync pretty quickly), perhaps checking if the selected object isn't moving along the equator and triggering slew would be the way to go? I'm sorry if this sounds lame (;

Changed in stellarium:
status: New → Opinion
Changed in stellarium:
assignee: nobody → Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab)
tags: added: plugin
Changed in stellarium:
assignee: Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) → Nick Fedoseev (nick-ut2uz)
Changed in stellarium:
status: Opinion → New
Revision history for this message
Alexander Wolf (alexwolf) wrote :

Implemented through RTS2

Changed in stellarium:
milestone: none → 0.16.0
assignee: Nick Fedoseev (nick-ut2uz) → Petr Kubánek (petr-kubanek)
status: New → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Petr Kubánek (petr-kubanek) wrote :

You need RTS2 driver capable to follow TLE. LX200 support for such behaviour is unclear. We know it works with SiTech controller, and should work with NGTCS. It will not work with anything else - I am unsure if e.g. Ascom is capable to do that, INDI for sure does not have capabilities.

How it works is that telescope is commanded to move with TLE coordinates, and then the telescope driver calculates target positions based on TLE, and sends required velocities and targets to the mount motors. Anything with RA/DEC will smart control will not work at the moment - you will need to change speeds too quickly for mount to react reasonably.

Changed in stellarium:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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