Automated altazimuth mount for a 6-inch Newtonian telescope

Abstract

An automated altazimuth mount was constructed for a 6-inch f/7 Newtonian telescope in order to provide automatic tracking and finding capabilities. The mount was based on the Dobsonian mount design. The actuation system for this telescope mount consists of wormwheel and worm on the altitude and azimuth axes where the worm on each axis was driven by a VEXTA 5-Phase Stepping Motor. A Zilog Encore! Z8F6401 microcontroller was used to control the stepping motors by reading and decoding the 56-bit instruction sent serially by the tracking software developed by Alexander Benjamin G. Flor Jr (2006). This study showed that the automated telescope mount has an average pointing error of 11.1 arcmin. Results also showed that the automated telescope was not suitable for exposure astrophotography. However, the automated telescope can precisely find and track stellar objects under low magnifications; hence this can be used for visual observation of bright stellar objects.