Realistically, we will always be working on telescope mounts that follow something like the LX-200 command set. In order to develop a system for pointing control it may be useful to have a telescope emulator – which this is:
http://miltonhill.us/software/index.html
It is Windows … wonder if there is something similar for Linux?
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Here is something interesting: http://astropix.nl/astro/LX200.htm Seems like a piece of hardware between a webcam and your telescope. Not free – costs ~100 Euro.
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This is something that allows tracking satellites which, like the Moon, do not move at a fixed rate: http://eq-mod.sourceforge.net/lxindex.html
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My problem with all of the above is that they require the mount to be ‘initialized’ before use – i.e. human intervention is needed after a system crash. No good for truly automatic systems. We need something that looks on the sky, finds the Moon, aligns on it, and starts tracking. I do not believe this exists, but we tested, by hand, all components on the MLO system. For Celestron telescopes there is something very interesting:
http://www.celestron.com/astronomy/celestron-starsense-accessory.html
