A duck, typing: Telescope

A while back, my son received a birthday present of a telescope: a Chinese-manufactured one, but of reasonable quality - but with no easy way of identifying targets. Since I am very much not an astronomer it proved tricky to train it on anything interesting - even the Moon, a big enough target by any standards, isn't that easy to aim at.

No problem, I thought: attach a 3-axis magnetometer/accelerometer to it, do a little maths, and we'll be able to read out the telescope's azimuth and elevation - and there are plenty of websites that will tell us the numbers we need to get pointed at the moon, other planets and so on.

Some 3D printing later, I had the sensor mounted securely enough on the telescope, and put together some Python to talk to it and, after some number crunching, display the angles. Great! Only - as it turns out - the sensor module requires a bit of setup - calibration - which is not trivial; at least, not if you want a degree of accuracy. So we don't yet have a simple readout of the telescope's angle... but hopefully some fiddling should get us there.

Watch this space - though possibly not with a telescope! - for my attempts at getting useful readouts from the sensor.