Lancaster Mobile Observatory

Town/Suburb/City : Wilmington
State/County/Province : De
Country : United States
This is this personal observatory of Robert Lancaster, who is a member of the Delaware Astronomical Society, an education asssociate of the Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory, and a Physics and Computer Science Teacher at Concord High School.  This observatory is fully mobile, sometimes taking photos at home, sometimes at Mt. Cuba, and oftentimes at interesting dark sky sites and star parties.  I have several telescopes including a homemade 10 inch f/6 Newtonian, a 6 inch f/4 Newtonian, and a couple of small cheap refractors.  I have several cameras including an SBIG ST8300M, a Canon 60D, and a Canon XSi.  I also have several camera lenses that I can mount on any of these cameras including the SBIG.  I have 2 mounts, a Losmandy G11 mount and a Meade LXD55 mount with Autostar.  I use many different combinations of these pieces of equipment to do astrophotography.  Traditionally, I have used a Macbook Pro and a lot of long wires to control my equipment.  But in Summer 2016, I embarked on a project to use INDI, KStars, and Ekos to make my observatory wireless and more robotic.  It is my hope that less and shorter wires will make it more efficienct, will cause less tripping hazards, and will allow me to image from my couch.  I have been playing around with two computers for this transformation, a Raspberry Pi 3 and an ODroid C2.  The experiements have been extremely promising.  I also hope to adapt these experiments to work with the equipment for our club and to share the experiments with other astrophotographers and beginners perhaps.
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