Telescope Control Plug-in for Stellarium
========================================
(Version 0.1.9; Bogdan Marinov <bogdan.marinov84@gmail.com>)

1. INTRODUCTION
===============

This plug-in allows Stellarium to be used as a software interface for
controlling a telescope on a computerized mount (a "GoTo telescope"). Up to nine
connections to separate telescopes can be maintained simultaneously.

Unlike the previous version of the same feature that still is integrated in
Stellarium, this plug-in offers a more user-friendly graphical interface
for setting up and configuring a telescope connection.

You can directly control a telescope connected to your computer, or set up
a connection over a network/the Internet to a telescope connected to another
computer running the appropriate software. As of version 0.1.9, the plug-in
supports only the simple Stellarium telescope "drivers" and
any third party software compatible with Stellarium's telescope protocol
(e.g. StellariumScope). Support for INDI and/or ASCOM is planned for future
versions.

2. REQUIREMENTS
===============

As of version 0.1.9, this plug-in IS NOT compatible with Stellarium
versions 0.10.2 and earlier.

As of version 0.1.9, this plug-in uses embedded telescope servers, which means
that it no longer needs external telescope server executables. Nevertheless,
they can be used to override the embedded code.

You can set the path to the servers directory. The default path is:

<user data directory>/servers/

If you want the latest versions, you can check out the source code and build the
binaries yourself:

https://stellarium.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/stellarium/trunk/telescope_server


3. USING THE PLUG-IN
====================

Some minimal instructions:

The main Telescope Control window is opened by pressing the "Configure" button
for the Telescope Control plug-in in the "Plugins" tab of the "Configuration"
window. It allows you to Add, Configure, Start and Stop (Connect and Disconnect)
a telescope connection.

Pressing Configure for a running connection will cause it to stop. After
finishing with the configuration, you will have to restart the connection by
pressing Start/Connect.

Pointing a telescope to a given object, a star for example, is done by selecting
that object and pressing [Ctrl+the number of that telescope] (Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9).

You can edit the "Serial port" drop-down list to add serial ports that are not
included in the list. For now, this list is empty in the Mac OS X version, so
the names of serial devices always have to be entered manually.

