Discovering New Worlds

A group of seniors in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science are helping amateur astronomers better explore the night sky.

Their Senior Capstone Design project, called Star Tracking System, is an easy-to-use device that allows a telescope to fix on an object in the sky and follow it through the night. The project could help amateur astronomers track stars and planets with more accuracy and consistency than is possible manually.

“[With] most systems that exist now, users have to know what star they want to track and they have to choose that from a database,” says Emma Keeley ’17, the design-team lead and a mechanical engineering major. “Or they have to [manually] point the telescope at the star, and that can be hard to do.”

The group showed the device at Watson’s senior-design presentations in May.

As with all senior projects, work on the system began in the fall and was the culmination of four years of education for the design team of Keeley, Drake Ward Van Ornam ’17 (electrical engineering), Kietra Elizabeth Wiggins ’17 (computer engineering) and Oliver Hull ’17 (computer science). They worked on the project with industry partner Lockheed Martin and with electrical and computer engineering Distinguished Service Professor Victor Skormin as faculty advisor.

Since stars in the night sky are small sources of light against a black background, one of the hurdles the team had to clear was finding tracking software that worked with low-textured images. It’s easy to track something with stark contrast, such as a black circle on a white background, but harder to do the same thing with less contrast, Hull says.

The group used the MOSSE Tracking Algorithm to solve the problem. The program created coordinates for the object being tracked and then translated those into adjustments for two motors on a frame holding a refracting telescope.

“For me, it was the structure that was required of this project,” says Ornam about what he valued most about working with industry partners. “Having deliverables and procedures that we had to follow was excellent. We had to work our way through that process.”

Another skill the team learned was reading and creating Pugh charts. These charts compared design ideas such as cost, size and materials with design criteria to decide what materials were the best to use.

“Most of what we had done [in classes] so far was design,” Keeley says. “To take a project and work with an industry partner, to design [the system] and have deliverables for a customer translates really well to finding a job in the engineering industry.”

For Wiggins, the diversity of the team was key to its success.

“It was good getting experience working on a team of people who have all of these different skill sets and who have learned things you haven’t,” she says. “Everyone gets the chance to shine.”