ScopeDriver lets you connect your computer to your astronomical telescope.

A computer-telescope connection adds many features to your telescope, harnessing the greater power of your computer to control your instrument. You can control your telescope from the comfort of indoors, or even across the Internet. You can also plan your observing in advance, on your computer, then instruct your telescope to take you on a tour of these objects, and log your observations from within the ScopeDriver package.

ScopeDriver can also control a camera via a serial shutter control, completely automating observing patrols and sky surveys.

If you’re new to astronomy (and even if you’re not), you can use Observing Lists created by talented people that take you on tours of interesting stars and deep sky objects. Move from one fascinating object to another, and read about them on your computer screen as you observe.

Why ScopeDriver?

We realize that people want a fast, reliable program that gets out of their way at the telescope. In fact, other developers who have seen ScopeDriver’s source code are amazed at how complex ScopeDriver is “under the hood.” Its interface is just so simple that people are surprised at how much it actually does.

We’re hard at work on ScopeDriver — and we add new features, too — but we spend a lot of time making the program faster, more intuitive, and easier to use under the stars.

Why put star charts in a telescope interface program?

In a program that controls your telescope, and is designed to be used at the telescope, why put star charts in the program? Looking through the eyepiece produces the most realistic sky view obtainable at any cost! And there are so many wonderful sky simulation application programs available, why waste precious development time reinventing the wheel?

Programs that try to simulate the sky and strive to be useful at the telescope generally fail at both objectives.

Why be graphics-intensive?

It’s cool to be able to download Hubble images, and there’s a place for this — indoors. At the telescope, who needs deep-space imagery or a chart on a monitor when you’re exploring the night sky with your own modern telescope? Why require frequent or constant attention to the computer screen when your focus needs to be on the guider or your imaging equipment?

Why require the latest hardware?

Most of us don’t want to expose a top-of-the-line laptop computer to the night air. If a program’s preferences window takes a few seconds to open on a 5 GHz machine, what’s the performance going to be like on an aging laptop computer? ScopeDriver makes modest demands on your system by design; we don’t want you waiting (or worse, rebooting) in the middle of an observing session.

It Slices! It Dices! It…

Products that purport to do everything usually do so at a price: either they don’t do everything well, they’re difficult to learn and use, they become too complex to adequately maintain, they’re unreliable, or a combination of all these. ScopeDriver is a solid, nimble performer that does its job, and does it well: it lets you quickly assemble observing lists, then gets out of your way as it guides you from object to object.