[Stellarium-pubdevel] Stellarium as a heads-up finderscope replacement?

[Mark A. H. <ha...@ke...>]

Hi stellarium devs,

I would like to turn Stellarium into a virtual finderscope for my
Dobsonian.  Picture a lightweight netbook or tablet computer, suitably
dimmed and filtered, mounted on the secondary cage next to the
eyepiece.  My current finder weights almost 1 kg so replacing it with a
computer is quite reasonable.  I think I need the following to make
this work, at a minimum:

1) An outboard telescope server to read the scope encoders, guide the
user through a 3-star alignment procedure, and send periodic RA/Dec
updates to Stellarium.  I'm hoping this would be the lion's
share of the work.  According to the telescope control docs, I should be
able to do this, and just ignore "goto" commands because I have no drive
system. Right?

2) A mode wherein Stellarium pans the view to keep the current
telescope position centered in the middle of the screen, while still
permitting zoom, use of oculars, etc.

3) Arbitrary field rotation of the Stellarium view, to keep "up"
pointed in the right direction as the computer screen rides on the end
of an alt-az mount which may be pointed anywhere in the sky.

After that, I would implement computer-assisted object finding
via an arrow drawn on the screen border (which way do I push to find
what I'm looking for).  Ultimately I envision a touch-driven
UI and tight integration with an electronic version of Kepple
& Sanner (Night Sky Observers Guide).  Hey, I can dream, right?

I'm guessing #3 and maybe #2 could be handled from within a new
plugin.  Before I dive into this, though, I'd like your opinions.  Has
this use case been contemplated before?  Any complications that I
should be aware of?

Thanks,

Mark