Hi Stan,

UPDATE:

I poked around and dug up my project notebooks for the observatory. Thumbing through them brought back a lot of details.😃

I wrote the original observatory software from scratch, based on a collection of formulas in a then-current edition of this book. The primary software, written in C, ran on an IBM PC. The PC was situated in an insulated control room where we could sit and operate the telescope and instrument packages without freezing our tails off... 😉

I also wrote a separate, somewhat simpler code system that employed a PSION Organizer II handheld computer in the role of "guide paddle" that we used when standing on the open observatory floor under the 1.2 meter instrument.

The PC software imported a modified version of the Yale Bright Star Catalog circa 1987, that had been modified to reduce its size to fit on a contemporary microcomputer and extended to include Messier and other objects.

I of course realize that controlling a space telescope will have a rather different (and fascinating!) set of problems to be solved, such as awareness of what sector of sky is presently obscured by the Earth, probably Sun avoidance (unless equipped with solar filters?), and initial orientation within the celestial sphere.

Stan, I would really love to discuss all this with you sometime at your convenience... 😉