Join or Visit the ASCOM Talk group
ASCOM-Talk Users Group
ASCOM Users Wiki

Linux MacOS ReST?
Developers: Take Note
Users: See the FAQ!

Join the FaceBook Group

Welcome to the ASCOM Initiative

This is the home of the ASCOM Initiative, a loosely-knit group of astronomy software developers and astronomy device manufacturers devoted to vendor-independent universal plug-and-play control. ASCOM is a many-to-many and language-independent architecture, supported by most astronomy devices which connect to Windows and now Linux and MacOS computers. The diagram below shows how ASCOM differs from traditional astronomy instrument control architectures. This architecture applies to both Windows/COM and cross-platform Alpaca technologies.

Need Help with an ASCOM compatible device or application?

The following live stream videos are nearly an hour long each. If you want to learn what we're doing to keep astronomy software as an open ecosystem, we hope you'll devote the time to learning. If you're new to all of this, we suggest you watch the Non-Technical Overview first.



For more information on the ASCOM Initiative, see the About ASCOM section and the navigation menu on the left.

Platform 6.5SP1

Download Platform

Platform 6.5SP1 Release Notes
Platform 6.5 Help (online)

Required for all drivers (see notes for Windows 7). This will install the Platform on a new PC, and it will also upgrade earlier installations of Platform versions 4, 5, and 6.

Drivers & Plug-ins

Download Drivers

Download and install the driver(s) for your astronomy instruments and devices. You'll also find plug-ins for TheSky and other useful tools and components here for download.