GoQat 3.2.0 now available! See the change log for more information about this major new release.

GoQat

GoQat is a hardware control and data acquisition program for astronomy on the Linux platform. It has an INDI client to operate any device with an INDI driver and offers fully integrated control of INDI imaging and autoguider cameras, autoguiding devices, focusers, telescope mounts and filter wheels. It also has native support for any camera from Quantum Scientific Imaging and any modern Starlight Xpress camera and filter wheel. GoQat can also record and replay monochrome image sequences in .SER format. GoQat is multithreaded and tuned to give as smooth a performance as possible.

GoQat user interface

 

Using GoQat 3.2.0, you can:

  • Set chip temperature and filter for your camera exposures, capture sub-frames and use binning.
  • Display real-time scrolling graphs of your camera temperature.
  • Calibrate the autoguider with the camera at any angle with a single mouse-click.
  • Autoguide your exposures using the fully integrated autoguiding functions: imaging exposures automatically wait until the autoguider is ready.
  • Show real-time scrolling strip charts of star positions for periodic error analysis.
  • Reduce noise across multiple exposures with dithering.
  • Focus your telescope automatically using 'V-curve' calibration, with compensation for temperature changes and focus changes with different filters.
  • Achieve pointing accuracy to a few arc seconds with iterative plate solve and GoTo.
  • Play back recorded video and automatically perform photometry and astrometry on each frame - ideal for asteroid occultations and other transient events.
  • Use task lists to control the operation of your telescope, imaging camera, autoguider, focuser and filter wheel completely unattended. GoQat can detect incoming tasks from a remote location and act accordingly.
  • Execute arbitrary scripts in the language of your choice, to perform any external operations that you can do with a script (e.g. live upload of images to a website) and to interact with and control GoQat.
  • Run multiple instances of GoQat either independently or in synchronisation, even across a WiFi network.

Please see the documentation or the screenshots for more information.

GoQat can be downloaded for free under the terms of the General Public License. See www.gnu.org/licenses/ for further details.