Isotropic and anisotropic pointing models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible, assumption-free pointing model for telescopes with serial kinematics, achieving high accuracy without physical constraints, suitable for real-world applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel, assumption-free parameterization for telescope pointing models that avoids parametric singularities and can be fitted with standard least squares methods.

Findings

Achieves 1.5-2 arcseconds RMS accuracy on real telescope data

Provides an alternative to physical constraint-based models

Demonstrates efficiency on meter-class telescopes

Abstract

This paper describes an alternative approach for generating pointing models for telescopes equipped with serial kinematics, esp. equatorial or alt-az mounts. Our model construction does not exploit any assumption for the underlying physical constraints of the mount, however, one can assign various effects to the respective components of the equations. In order to recover the pointing model parameters, classical linear least squares fitting procedures can be applied. This parameterization also lacks any kind of parametric singularity. We demonstrate the efficiency of this type of model on real measurements with meter-class telescopes where the results provide a root mean square accuracy of 1.5-2 arcseconds.