Welcome to Chimera’s documentation!

Chimera: Observatory Automation System

Chimera is a package for control of astronomical observatories, aiming at the creation of remote and even autonomous (“robotic”) observatories in a simple manner. Using Chimera you can easily control telescopes, CCD cameras, focusers and domes in a very integrated way.

Chimera is:

Distributed
Fully distributed system. You can use different machines to control each instrument and everything will looks like just one.
Powerful
Very powerful autonomous mode. Give a target and exposure parameters and Chimera does the rest.
Hardware friendly
Support for most common off-the-shelf components. See plugins page for supported devices.
Extensible

Very easy to add support for new devices. See plugins page for more information.

Flexible
Chimera can be used in a very integrated mode but also in standalone mode to control just one instrument.
Free
It’s free (as in free beer), licensed under the GNU license.
A Python Package
All these qualities are the consequence of the chosen programming language: Python.

Contact us

If you need help on setting chimera on your observatory, please contact us over our mailing list.

Bugs and feature requests can be sent over our GitHub page.

License

Chimera is Free/Open Software licensed by GPL v2 or later (at your choice).