Tangential at best, but as a fan of his books I was happy to stumble upon one of W. Richard Stevens’ earlier examples of technical writing: a guide to Forth for Kitt Peak national observatory. Apparently Forth was commonly used in observatories; I have no idea whether that’s still true.

https://www.forth.org/KittPeakForthPrimer.pdf

Fantastic news. As ACP is no longer in development, I am starting to slowly look for a replacement, and a few things that come up in my mind:

- Will it work with MaximDL to acquire images and autoguide, or will it simply not need it at all? - Will it work with PWI3 for autofocusing? - Will offset tracking (at custom dRA, dDec rates) be implemented at some point to track artificial satellites? - Will it at some point implement targeting using TLEs and MPC elements? - I am extensively using #WAITZENDIST and other #WAIT directives to wait for an object to be at certain altitude - would be really good to implement that in observation plans (a single plan can do a number of things sequentially.) - Can plans launch custom Python scripts and read/write stuff from/to files?

I probably want too much at this point, but sincerely wishing you best of luck with this incredible project, will definitely follow all the developments!

I used Astra on one of my old observatories (an aging Explora-Dome) and I can say it's definitely a very nice experience compared to "legacy" tools like ACP from DC3. That being said, however, it kind of sits on the lower end of functionality compared to existing commercial observatory control offerings like Starkeeper's Voyager platform, especially when it comes to advanced scheduling features and scripting. Still, for basic needs it's nice to have a decent open source alternative in a very niche ecosystem.

Astra

Astral (maker of uv)

Astro (javascript web framework)

I am trying to keep these terms straight in my head -- it's hard

Excellent. Now all I needs is my own observatory. Oh, and the land in a location worthy of building that observatory. That's said only half jokingly. I already have my mount, a primary scope, a second scope for guiding, and a camera. So it is something a boy dreams about doing when he grows up.

Are there open source software platforms used for industrial processes?

Can I download software to control a refinery, brewery, car plant? With the interest in digital twins, would not be terribly surprising if I could simulate pretty complicated processes.

We use Astra with an old radio telescope in Germany. It's great software if you have the use for it.

mfw the rocket company is too irrelevant for name collisions