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The calculus basis

A project log for AstroScopus

A connected laser pointer for stargazing

glitchmakerGlitchmaker 08/17/2014 at 15:490 Comments

In order to calculate the position of a star in the nightly sky, we need to agree to an epoch and use a catalog that contains the position of the stars at the chosen epoch. For my project I will use epoch J2000 and the Bright Star Catalog. This catalog contains 9110 stars with magnitude greater than +6.5, meaniing that are visible to the naked eye. This number is too large to our application, since the laser just gives us a coarse position in the sky. The first tests will be made with a list  with a number of stars one or two orders of magnitude lower.

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