ccdciel_0.8.0-266 can capture a video.

Wow, lots of progress, can't wait to test it!
Thank you.

Piero

In any case, you can try it with web-camera.

Hi,

when trying to debayer an image I get an exception saying "Unable to convert image to 24 bit". I have images coming from a QHY8L ccd.
Also, loading FITS or displaying downloaded images takes a long time, usually around 20 seconds, is it normal?
I'm using CCDciel on a RPi3.

Thank you.
Piero

20 second download is normal for a un binned image. No clue on the debayer error. I use EKOS only to capture the image, not debayer. The software would have to know what the bayer pattern is to be able to debayer it. .... Bruce Morrell

Hi Bruce and thanks for your answer.
I think there might be a misunderstanding however, I'm talking about CCDciel not Ekos.
Also, regarding the download aspect, the download itself seems to be quite fast, instead it's the "displaying" time, the FITS processing time (after the download is complete) that takes that much.

Thank you.
Piero

I have done a couple of successful sessions with ccdciel running on RasPI 3 and so far I am very happy with how it works.
I like that it has very simple interface with just one window and image preview is in the same window.
The best part is that so far it is very stable and has not crashed a single time, whereas Ekos/Kstars were crashing every session.
I also like that it integrates nicely with SkyChart and at the same time it is not one huge monolithic program.

I ran into issues with plate solving, where for some reason ccdciel was incorrectly guessing resolution scale due to binning, which was causing plate solving to fail.
For now, I resolved this problem by getting the source and compiling it after changing it to do blind solving without all the optimizations.
Also internal star detection algorithm was not very good at detecting stars for different images I used for plate solving, which I solved by providing parameter --use-sextractor.
After these two changes were done, plate solving works very reliably and fairly fast - about 30 seconds in total.

Patrick,
If you are reading this, congratulations on creating a great image capturing software, which does not try to do everything but does one task very well!
Also, I think that allowing user to select blind solving and addition of --use-sextractor to parameters would greatly help with improving reliability of plate solving.
I started working on enhancements, described above, if you are interested in incorporating them into project, I can provide a patch.

Alex

Hi Alex,

Nice it mostly work for you with the RPi3.
Can you give us a brief description of the hardware you are using?

Before to do a change to the code we must identify why the image scale is wrong with binning in your case, because this is normally taken into account and this work fine with image taken with the ccd_simulator.
You must first check the FITS header of your images, look how the pixel size, the binning and the focal length are reported.
You can also look at the solve-field command and output from the right click menu "view last resolver log". Compare the values for --scale-low and --scale-high with binned and unbinned images.

From the menu Edit-Options-Astrometry, you can add any option for solve-field in the "other options" field.
Adding --use-sextractor here work without problem.
And to invalidate the scale option just add: -L 0 -H 3600

Patrick

Hi Patrick and all,


Did you have any chance to work on adding support for Lin_guider?
I really love CCDciel and would like to use it for my astrophoto sessions, but PHD2/Indi perform poorly on the RPi3 with my ASI120MM, whereas Lin-guider is lightning fast.

In case you would be willing (and have time) to work on it, I volunteer to test your code, since Lin_guider supports ASI cameras
Thank you for your great great work for all the astro community, especially from us Linux users

Ciao,
Piero

Hi guys,

To be honest, I do not think there is any chance for Lin-guider to have native INDI support. But INDIGO support for Lin-guider is on my TODO list
This way it will be able to connect to both INDIGO and INDI, as INDIGO is backwards compatible with INDI...

Rumen

Hi Rumen,
this is great news!
Any idea about possible development times?
Thank you.
Piero

Hi Piero,
first i have fo finish the qhy driver for INDIGO. This will probably take about a month as i am on vacation now and after that i will need at least a week to catch up at work. And then i may be able to start work on linguider. It should not take too much a probably a couple of weeks... so i would say late June early July at earliest.

Rumen