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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

Remote public observatory opening with INDI

  • Posts: 13
  • Thank you received: 5
Hi,
I'm writing about an observatory in a town near Bologna (Italy) and the stargazers' association that has built it (Gruppo Astrofili PERSicetani).
We are using INDI since 2008(ish) and during the past year we rewrote the driver to make full use of the generic classes exposed by the library.

Some night ago with some friends we did a "special" observatory opening event, driving the telescope from 400km of distance and showing the live images to the general public.

Setup:
- at the observatory: two people setting up the system and looking for holes between the clouds to point the telescope to (obviously we had rain and hail in the afternoon)
- at the talk venue: two people, one speaking to the public and another at the computer
- software used: a mix of KStars/Ekos at the venue, Cartes du Ciel/Skychart and XEphem at the observatory, Google Hangouts to communicate between us
- hardware used: the observatory telescope (40cm, self built), a Canon EOS 5D, a C.H.I.P. to drive the camera

The night was a clear pretense to show off the drivers and protocol capabilities, but still 60 people "observed" for two hours looking at the live images.
I planned to wrote a "what went wrong" post but everything went unexpectedly well. Really, we had HAIL six hours before the talk!
We just had some minor issue with the camera going to sleep too often/early and messing with indi_gphoto_ccd (it didn't happen during the tests, but we have not really looked too much into it). And someone decided it was a good idea disassembling/reassembling the focuser two days before the talk: one of the screw fastening it to the telescope fell down while I was attaching the camera. Sigh!

Mixed links:
- the observatory: www.gapers.it/ (italian only, sorry, I hope google translate works well) :(
- the event: moca.olografix.org/speakers/sky-falling-osservazione-stellare/
- the host conference: moca.olografix.org/it/moca/ it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Olografix_CAmp
- the C.H.I.P.: getchip.com/
(some slides should appear over the event/conference pages soonish)

Thanks, really!
Riccardo and Massimiliano
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq, Chris Ryan, Teseo
7 years 7 months ago #9837

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Wow that's really cool! Glad you shared it with us! Were any video recorded of the event? Any shots of KStars/Ekos in action?
7 years 7 months ago #9839

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  • Posts: 13
  • Thank you received: 5
7 years 7 months ago #9841

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  • Posts: 13
  • Thank you received: 5
In case someone is still reading this... The people organizing the conference have not published our slides but we did another talk about INDI , and this time slides are available.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq
7 years 3 months ago #13247

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