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.