Portal to the "Hans Off!" Webtool:

Telescope Coordinates Calculation Script

About:

"Hans Off!" is the name of a university project wherein we must create an automatic telescope that can photograph a variety of local planets & moons and distant stars. Presented here is my software portion of the project, which allows one to determine where in the sky certain celestial bodies are. (Note: stars database only contains stars within a certain belt above the Lubbock sky (24/7) and 96 named stars... so if you are not in a similar latitude, there may not be some of your desired celestial bodies... I am intending on updating this to cover the entire globe. Feel free to remind me of this by emailing me using the link below.)

NOTE: COORDINATES ARE MANUALLY ENTERED. OTHERWISE, THE OUTPUT DEFAULTS TO THE LOCATION OF TTU'S ECE BUILDING!

If you have a bug report, want to use the system but it is down, or have some feedback/suggestion, please feel free to contact me via my email. For bug reports, please send me a screenshot of your query, the time of your query (in UTC or in your time zone, if you're fine with that), and what the error message might be.

For the current list of available stars, click the plot below. This will prompt you to download the CSV file. All data in that table courtesy of the European Space Agency

a plot of the current stars available



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Background animation by Erica Anderson