RTS2 is software for a fully autonomous astronomical observatory. It takes care of details necessary for the observatory operation. It keeps care of closing it when bad weather arrives, opening when weather permits operation. One of its driving requirements was to provide a modular and flexible environment, able to control a lot of (quickly changing) devices.

RTS2 is split into two main components - the RTS2 library, released under LGPL, and RTS2 drivers, released under GPL. Pleasse see COPYING.LESSER and COPYING and header of source files for details.

RTS2 is not an interactive planetarium. RTS2 provides various interfaces which third parties can use to access system functionalities. Probably the best is JSON API. Stellarium has plugin to interact with RTS2 telescopes.

For further details, please visit:

http://www.rts2.org

For questions, comments, suggestions and problems, please send emails to petr (at) rts2 [dot] org or to the RTS2 developer list rts-2-devel (at) lists [dot] sourceforge [dot] net. Please be aware that support is first provided to parties sharing development and implementation costs.

The easiest way on Ubuntu/debian based distributions is to install RTS2 from packages. The packages are available from Launchpad.

If you want to install from the source code, please see the INSTALL file.