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

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

Join the FaceBook Group

Videos for developers:

Click to see this video

Welcome to the ASCOM Initiative

The following live stream videos are nearly an hour long each. We gave serious thought to chopping them down, but in the end if you are seriously interested in learning what we're doing to drive astronomy software forward, 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.

 

This is the home of the ASCOM Initiative, a loosely-knit group of astronomy software developers and astronomy device manufacturers devoted to vendor-independent 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.

ASCOM Platform 6.5SP1 is Current

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For more information on the ASCOM Initiative, see the About ASCOM section.

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.