Cartography:Main

Sky cartography software

Stellarium

Stellarium is a free planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is the perfect sky map for beginners and for realistic rendering.

Stellarium is written in C++ and is working on most operating systems.

Telescope control

Stellarium has the ability to control telescopes for GoTo operations. It does not check for sun-pointing or mount collision. Two modes of interaction are possible, as explained on the main wiki page for telescope control. The first mode is using a telescope server, a standalone application interacting with the telescope device. It requires command-line interaction and manual configuration. The second mode is using the telescope control plug-in, with its graphical user interface. It connects to the telescope devices either directly, with the serial port, or using the telescope servers from the first method.

The only advantage I see about using a telescope server instead of the direct link is that it can be distributed on the network. The telescope server communicates with Stellarium using a stellarium-specific protocol described here (source).

Here is the list of compatible telescopes with either ways.

Cartes du Ciel (CdC) / SkyChart

Website

XEphem

Website

XEphem is a generic INDI client: Control any INDI-compliant devices with XEphem.

The XmTel package provides the INDI drivers (and an INDI server) for telescopes. It is compatible with XEphem.

KStars

Website. INDI-enabled.