Hi Everybody,
My name is Pete and I’m an Amateur Astronomer. About 4 years ago, I got into electronically assisted astronomy (EAA). This involves replacing the eyepiece with a camera and in my case moving into my home office to control my telescope remotely from 4-5m!
Over the years, I noticed that I was performing the same tasks repeatedly. So, I created a small Windows application to orchestrate the applications I used through their external interfaces and scripting languages. This worked very well for SharpCap, AstroPlanner, Stellarium and TheSky etc. However, Starry Night 8 did not have this feature, but it did have a publicly available Plugin SDK. I embarked on the development of an experimental plugin that allowed me to synchronise Starry Night’s view with my selected object in AstroPlanner. Along with a couple of other commands and the ability to retrieve information on the selected object, FOV etc from Starry Night.
As this is a niche project, I thought I would share it with other Starry Night users who might find some use for it. The code is publicly available on GitHub, and I have created an experimental binary release of the plugin and test client. I hope it might prove useful to other Starry Night users even if it assists in the creation of your own plugins.
GitHub: https://github.com/Xio1996/SNRemoteControlPlugin
There is also an “award winning” YouTube video :-) which takes you through the simple installation process and demonstrates its features using the test client.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/YQMierNVwMQ
It was created in Visual Studio 2022 using the Plugin SDK and tested in Starry Night Pro 8.1 on Windows 11.
The Simulation Curriculum Starry Night Plugin SDK can be found here:
https://support.simulationcurriculum.com/hc/en-us/articles/231532987-Starry-Night-Plugin-SDK
Have fun.
Pete