TelescopeYoke

Smart-telescope features for ordinary Sky-Watcher SynScan gear.

Free and open source. Runs on a laptop beside the telescope: Linux, with a Windows port.

Try the demo Download 0.2.1 Supported hardware Source on GitHub

A minute and a half of the demo: tonight's report, a target picked, a GoTo shown as a plan and then centred by plate solving, focusing, and an imaging run with cloud coming over — The demo: a pretend mount, camera and sky, with the real centring, focusing and stacking code running on them.

What it does

You already own the mount, the handset and a camera. TelescopeYoke is the part a smart telescope has and yours does not: it works out where the telescope is really pointing and puts the target in the middle of the frame.

Plans the night: darkness, Moon, cloud, and a GO / MARGINAL / NO-GO verdict, with targets ranked for your own sky and your own blocked horizons.
Controls Sky-Watcher SynScan mounts through the handset's serial lead, correcting for a handset clock that is wrong.
Plate-solves and centres every GoTo, so a home position set by eye and a rough polar alignment still land the target on the sensor.
Talks you onto focus: turn the focuser and listen for "Best focus. Hold".
Takes and stacks the pictures: short exposures, each one checked, poor ones rejected, the rest lined up and added.
Keeps the mount inside its limits. Every move is checked first and shown as a plan; nothing turns until you confirm it.

It runs on your own computer. No account, no cloud service, no ASCOM.

A real result

The Dumbbell Nebula, M27 — The Dumbbell Nebula (M27): 48 two-second exposures through a 150 mm Newtonian on an EQ3 Pro that was polar aligned by eye. The home position was about ten degrees out; plate solving found the target anyway.

A move shown as a plan, waiting to be confirmed — Every move is a plan first: where the tube will end up, which side of the mount, and the limits it was checked against.

Try the demo: no telescope needed

The demo is the whole application on a pretend telescope. Nothing is connected to your mount and nothing can move, so it is safe to try on the computer that sits beside real equipment.

Ubuntu or Debian

wget https://github.com/Ryan-Clinton/telescopeyoke/releases/download/v0.2.1/TelescopeYoke-v0.2.1.zip
unzip TelescopeYoke-v0.2.1.zip
cd TelescopeYoke-v0.2.1
./install.sh --demo

Windows 10 or 11

Install 64-bit Python 3.11 or newer from python.org, ticking "Add python.exe to PATH".
Download TelescopeYoke-v0.2.1.zip and unpack it.
Double-click try-demo.cmd.

A window opens with tonight's report. Pick a target, press "Centre with plate solve", and watch it find and correct its own pointing error. Then try Focus and Imaging; "The pretend sky" lets you bring cloud over or pull the camera's lead out, to see what it does when a night goes wrong.

The Tonight screen — Tonight: the verdict and the best targets.

The Focus screen — Focus: one number, and which way it is going.

Supported hardware

It is new, and it says plainly what it has and has not been proven on. So far it has run on one telescope, the author's:

Mount	Handset	Camera	System	What has worked	Tried by
Sky-Watcher EQ3 Pro	SynScan, firmware 3.35	Altair Hypercam 183C	Ubuntu 26.04	Planner, mount moves, camera, focusing, plate solving and GoTo with centring, under real stars	the author
the same EQ3 Pro	the same	the same	Windows 11	The demo, and camera frames indoors. No mount driven yet	the author
EQ5	SynScan	any	Linux or Windows	wanted	could be you
HEQ5	SynScan	any	Linux or Windows	wanted	could be you
EQ6, EQ6-R	SynScan	any	Linux or Windows	wanted	could be you
a mount with an EQStar or other EQMOD-style controller	none	any	Linux or Windows	wanted: whether it answers at all	could be you

EQ5, HEQ5 and EQ6 mounts with a SynScan handset speak the same serial protocol, so they are likely to work, but nobody has tried. On Linux the camera is read through INDI; on Windows only Altair cameras are supported. ASCOM is not used, and an EQMOD or ASCOM setup you already have is left alone: close EQMOD while TelescopeYoke has the mount's port, and the other way round.

Looking for testers. If you have one of these mounts, a report from you is worth more than any new feature, and you do not have to let it move your mount. ./doctor.py --report only looks at what is connected: it writes out what the handset says the mount is, its firmware, and what was found, with your location left out. Paste that into a hardware report, or ask first in Discussions. Your name goes beside your row if you want it there.

Find out more

The README: everything it does, and exactly what has been proven on real hardware.
Setup: installing it for a real telescope, on Ubuntu and on Windows.
Changes in each release.
Discussions: questions, ideas, and pictures you have taken.