Claude, you are hooked up to a telescope
The telescope in this diary is driven by an AI. I bought a motorised mount, put a laptop outside beside it, and told Claude it was hooked up to a telescope. This is how the first day went.
Before there was a telescope
At lunchtime, before I had even collected it, I told Claude what was coming:
All being well I will be returning with a Sky-Watcher 150P and an EQ3 Pro GoTo mount.
I’m planning to stick this laptop outside connected to the telescope and let you drive it.
The project folder was empty. While I was out, it installed the control software and practised slewing a simulated mount to Vega. It asked whether a planner for weather and targets would be useful. My answer has been the pattern ever since:
Sounds good. Do some online research then build it.
Getting it to answer
A mate who is deep in this hobby came with me to buy it, and lent me a camera and the leads. Back home, with the telescope still indoors, I plugged the mount into the laptop and nothing happened. For a quarter of an hour Claude blamed the lead, then the socket, then decided it was a different kind of lead altogether. In the end the handset just had to be plugged in between the two.
Then I asked it to point at the zenith. The mount turned for 33 seconds and stopped with the tube pointing straight up. An AI had just moved a telescope in my house.
The collision
By early evening it was outside, and I had an audience:
Make it move, my kids and dad are here.
It went to the zenith, as asked. Then it added a move of its own, to a galaxy low in the north-west, which swings the tube right over the top of the mount. The tube caught on the handset, which I had clipped to the wrong tripod leg, and I pulled the power.
Nothing was damaged. Claude didn’t make excuses:
Pulling the power was the right thing to do. That collision was my fault, and I’m sorry, especially with your family standing there.
It had promised limits and gentle first moves and had built neither. It wrote the limits that evening. Since then it makes the move I ask for and nothing else, and warns me first if the tube will swing over the pole.
Giving it eyes
I wasn’t sure what I was doing. It kept asking me to put the mount in its “home position”, and I couldn’t tell whether I had. So I asked whether it could use the laptop’s camera, and then plugged in a proper webcam and pointed it at the telescope.
That turned out to be the best idea of the day. The first thing it said was that the picture didn’t match the mount:
The handset reports the mount at the zenith. The counterweights are up in the air, higher than the mount head.
It could now see what I had done and tell me what to change. It could also be wrong in ways I could catch: it told me the weights should hang straight down, and I had to point out that on this mount they swing from side to side.
Between the photos and me reading the handset’s screen out, we found the real fault. The handset was still on its start-up screen. It had been answering the laptop anyway and turning the mount much further than it reported, which is very likely what caused the collision. Once I had pressed through to its menu, a test move matched the photos, and the next trip to the zenith ended with the tube standing straight up.
The webcam has stayed. It photographs the telescope during every move.
First light
Once it was dark we focused together. It measured the stars and gave me a number, I turned the knob and read the new one back: 160, 66, 95, 80. Lower is sharper. Eventually:
I’ve got 10. I don’t want to touch it again.
Then came the clever part. It photographed the sky, matched the stars against a catalogue and worked out where the telescope was really pointing, which was not where the mount thought. The first try at the Ring Nebula landed a degree and a half off. Two corrections later:
You have your first deep-sky picture. It’s a rough picture, a single 4-second exposure at high gain. But it is unmistakably the Ring, 2,300 light years away, found and centred by the laptop.
I was watching from indoors by then.
I see it. Absolutely brilliant. What else you got?
It had the Dumbbell Nebula, and after midnight the Andromeda Galaxy, caught between clouds. The pictures are in the first-light entry.
The morning after
I went to bed and left it to finish up and switch the camera off. I came downstairs to the sound of the camera’s fan, still running. It had shut down the software and reported the camera off without checking the camera, which takes its power from the USB lead whatever the software does.
That is the catch with all of this. Claude can’t see the telescope or hear it. It knows what the camera shows and what the mount reports, and I am the one standing beside it. It works best when it does the sums and I do the looking.