For those of you living in a major metropolitan area, the sparsely populated night sky may not be a big draw. But when you’re out in the country, the starry sky can be breathtaking. That may be why so many amateur astronomers head to the Golden Gate Star Pary. GSSP is a 4 night dark sky event held each summer usually in early July at Frosty Acres Ranch in North-Eastern California, near Mount Lassen, alongside rural Adin, California. GSSP has dark skies from horizon to horizon, and room for 100s of astronomers. Recently, Raspberry Pi made as splash at the event. Richard Sutherland brought his Raspberry Pi based device that attaches to a telescope and takes photos of the night sky. Its can determine where the telescope is pointed, and help sky gazers discover new objects in the night sky. Here’s more from RaspberryPi.com:
Community members have already built over a dozen units as part of the initial design testing. Richard hopes to produce PiFinder build kits so enthusiasts can make their own, as well as fully assembled units for stargazers who want to skip the DIY. He also has ideas for creating an even more compact version using Raspberry Pi Compute Module in the future. I suggest he trademarks ‘Pocket PiFinder’ now.
Richard took the PiFinder to the spectacularly named Golden State Star Party last week. It’s a multi-night gathering of hundreds of amateur astronomy enthusiasts on a cattle farm somewhere in the wilds of California. Several attendees saw the PiFinder in action and committed to purchasing either a DIY build kit or a fully assembled unit for themselves, and even more people lapped up PiFinder stickers.
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