Oeil 1.0 visual control system for the pointing and tracking of ground-based telescopes

An inexpensive solution using an artificial vision system appears to the problem of pointing, tracking and guiding a telescope. A stellar sensor called "R2D2" has been developed. The elements of the system are a CMOS sensor with the respective optics and "Oeil 1.0", a software package that we have developed under the object oriented environment of Matlab 7.0. The software is built in a graphical user interface that allows an easy interaction between the user and the system. The stellar sensor is mounted in parallel to the telescope, captures images of the night sky and sends them to the software, which makes preprocessing and noise reduction routines, identifies the stars and their centroids, and calculates the equatorial coordinates of all the stars, the center of the image and any other point into the image. Finally the tracking of the stellar object placed in the center of the field of view is made thanks to the continuously feedback of images and the successful results obtained with the image processing techniques.