pyscope 0.2.0

A python package for controlling small optical telescopes

This is the repository for pyscope, a pure-Python package for robotic scheduling, operation, and control of small optical telescopes.

pyscope is an open-source project that provides a set of tools to rapidly and easily control astronomical instrumentation. It is designed to be modular and extensible, allowing users to easily add support for new devices and observatories. pyscope is built on top of the ASCOM standard, but also provides support for non-ASCOM devices. Users may also access their devices through third-party applications such as MaxIm DL.

Observatories who use pyscope can take advantage of the telrun module, which provides a simple interface for fully-robotic observatory control.

pyscope is aiming to become an astropy-affiliated package.

Features

• Control observatory hardware with Python

• Support for ASCOM and non-ASCOM devices

• Observatory convenience methods like run_autofocus and recenter

• telrun module for fully-robotic operation of an observatory

• Basic data reduction tools like avg_fits and ccd_calib

• Simple analysis scripts like calc_zmag

• Powered by Astropy, Astropy-affiliated packages, and ASCOM

Installation

pyscope is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

pip install pyscope

pyscope will be available on conda-forge soon.

Development Installation

We recommend using a virtual environment for development. You may create a new virtual environment with pip:

python -m venv pyscope-dev
source pyscope-dev/bin/activate

Or with conda:

conda create -n pyscope-dev python=3.12
conda activate pyscope-dev

To install pyscope for development, clone the repository and install with pip:

git clone https://github.com/macro-consortium/pyscope
cd pyscope
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Usage

TBD

Documentation

All supporting documentation can be found at readthedocs.

Citing

If you use this package in your research, please cite it using the following:

History

pyscope is based off of the IOTAlib (Iowa Optical Telescope Automation library) package, drawing on 25+ years of robotic observatory development at the University of Iowa, now with an emphasis on usage by anyone with a computerized telescope and python experience.

Contributing

Please see the developer documentation.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 License.

Issues

Please post any issues you find here.