NOTE: This site is no longer maintained! Everything here is a copy of the old roboticobservatory.com site as it existed on the day of the sale of Robotic Observatory Ltd. I'm keeping it around for historical and informational purposes, but be aware that the software here is not being updated and that I am not accepting clients in the field of observatory automation.
Source Code - fragments of source code and algorithm examples that can be used in your applications, including an extensive selection of modular routines that can be used as building blocks for your own scripts. Somewhat out of date considering the advent of ACP3, but these demonstrate some ideas anyway.
Software - scripts and ASCOM clients and servers for telescope control and data reduction. This includes Ultimate, the observatory control client system that consumes most of Robotic Observatory Ltd.'s development time. It also contains information on our ASCOM server Widgets, the Maxim-DL compatible QuickCalibrate fast calibration utility, and other executables and open-source projects.
Hardware - Plans for hardware devices.
Rockland Observatory, a facility managed by Robotic Observatory Ltd., is a private research and development observatory south of Sierra Vista, Arizona. Currently, this facility is being reborn at a new facility - hopefully there will be new content here by spring of 2004.
701 Junk Bond Observatory - some information about 701 Junk Bond Observatory (formerly 701 Sierra Vista), Dave Healy's pioneering facility.
Jeff Medkeff's home page - my home page, with a link to my amateur astronomy pages and other stuff.
I maintain a mailing list of professional and amateur astronomers running observatories of varying levels of automation. Most of the traffic is source code samples, advice, and support issues. Traffic is mostly light to none with occasional bursts of activity. To join, send an e-mail to this address.
This site is static and heirarchical, so be prepared to use the back button on your browser for navigation.
This site uses HTML which should be readable in any browser. It is served by Apache.
This site adopts many of the suggestions found in this book, which I strongly recommend you read if you have anything at all to do with maintaining a website.
On many pages on this site, you will find an "add a comment" button. We use Loquacious for this service, since this site probably isn't going to get large enough to warrant us running our own RDBMS and web connection software. Loquacious is a service provided by Philip Greenspun. There are two things about this service that the average RoboticObservatory user might want to know. The first is that comment-enabled pages use one line of javascript to serve up the comments. This is the only legitimate use of web-based javascript I've come across, but if you have javascript turned off, never fear - you will be able to see page comments on a separate page on Philip's site, using a link provided here. The second thing you might want to know is that when you leave a comment, the pictures you see are taken by Philip, who is an accomplished photographer.