Stellarium on MacOS: control Alpaca telescope?

[ihabmmali]

Hello,
I'm trying to figure out how I can connect a Stellarium instance running on MacOS to a telescope connected to a Windows mini PC running the ASCOM remote. The telescope is exposed to the network through the Alpaca driver from ASCOM remote and I can access it in other software from the same MacOS computer.

[gzotti]

It seems none of us 3 developers has time/such instruments to actually go out observing. What we know is in the User Guide. If you find out a solution, we could add a page to the User Guide for the benefit of others. As mentioned numerous times, a Qt5-based build may work better for the TelescopeControl plugin.

[ihabmmali]

thank you but ASCOM doesn't appear to be an option in MacOS version of stellariaum...I understand that ASCOM platform is generally limited to windows which is probably why the option doesn't show up on MacOS (i.e. ascom support is not implemented outside the windows version). There's another indirect option "remote" which seems to allow network connections but the documentation is little bit vague: "remote A device is connected to a remote computer and the software that drives it can ’talk’ to Stellarium over the network; this software can be either one of Stellarium’s stand-alone telescope servers, or a third party application."

Is there any documentation on the protocol used for this connection option?

[gzotti]

We inherited this bit of documentation from the original developers of this part. What we know is in the User Guide. What others may have found out is unknown to us.

[alex-w]

Stellarium doesn’t support Alpaca

[vyskocil]

I just wrote a Python script that bridge the old Stellarium telescope control protocol and Alpaca. I tested it on my Mac :

https://github.com/vyskocil/Polaris/blob/main/stellarium_alpaca.py

Hope this will help !

[gzotti]

For those developers who don't want to look into our sources, we can of course print that ~1 page in the Guide. Is it meaningful? Or should we just add an FAQ link to the sources. Or maybe this should go into the README inside the TC plugin sources.

[10110111]

As you can see above, I have tried looking into our sources, and I'm already puzzled by two copies of the implementation, and I have only a guess as to which one is actually used. Better have the protocol documented properly in an obvious first place to look: the User Guide. Though, if you insist, the README would be OK too—at least available from the repo.

[gzotti]

No, OK, User Guide. I have seen this protocol years ago on sf, but as the telescope servers were never inside our repo (and were "old and outdated" when I joined in 2010), I lost track. If the servers are still useful (and this is a good example), they should be kept accessible. If the server sources are lost (or even, just because it can be done and Python is so widely used), I would like to see a modern reference implementation in Python as part of github/Stellarium/telescope-server.

[gzotti]

@10110111 , @alex-w shall we already disable ASCOM for Qt6-based builds? Issues persist. Whoever has time, ASCOM7 RC1 is out with the latest Alpaca, and it seems moving to TCP/IP based Alpaca is the most meaningful solution.

[10110111]

I think the option should just be grayed out for now, with a tooltip or parentheses telling to use a Qt5-based build. After Alpaca support is implemented, it would replace this option (possibly leaving it in Qt5-based builds for a few releases).