Hi everyone.
Currently I am using a raspberry pi3b as indi server(no astroberry image)
My main camera is a Nikon DSLR D3200. When I save the images to either the raspbery pi or the machine where I connect remotely to the indi server the fits images generated have a fits header with info about the target and the camera's details.

It is a bit slow doing this way and I thought I would rather save only to the SD card in the camera.
I have done the changes required in the Image settings area of the GPhotoCCD tab to only save to the camera's SD card and do not download them.
However after inspecting the images generated in Kstar's fits viewer I noticed that it does not have any data in the fits header.
Is it something expected?

It might be due the image not saving as *.fits. I have also noticed that no formatting happens at all on the filename of the images saved on the camera's SD card.
I get files names like DSC_0011.NEF instead of the nicer format I get when saving to the raspberry pi polaris_Light_1_secs_2022-07-02T13-24-11_000.fits

Is there a way to force saving images to the camera's sd card as fits instead of nef?
In my GPhotoCCD settings I have got the format=NEF(raw) and encode=FITS.

Thanks for the help.

Although I'm not familiar with the specific code, I suspect that the option for saving to the camera just enables the default storage attributes that you have defined by the camera, that is, you're saving as Nikon NEF which is the preferred way of saving the raw data on your D3200. I don't expect the driver lets you override the saving format.

One way of speeding things up considerably is to either boot from an SSD or have an attached SSD on your RPi for storing your images (which you'd keep as .fits, to preserve the capture info.

Cheers

Hello Daniel,

the INDI Gphoto driver uses the libgphoto2 library to communicate with the DSLR.
Setting the camera's SD card is basically the same as e.g. using the command line tool and setting:
That is, the RAW or JPEG image is not leaving the camera via any USB out, but is directly stored on the camera's SD card (when inserted) when taking an image or movie.
So saving the image in FITS is not possible when setting the target to SD. To save the image in FITS format, the RAW camera image first has to be read out from the camera
via USB (e.g. on Rpi or any PC) and then converted to FITS format. Once converted to FITS format the FIT headers are set.

Cheers
Thomas

Thanks Jerry and Thomas for explaining, that makes total sense!.

I believe I have a SSD disk laying around, I will try it to speed up the saving process.

Daniel,

The file name is not saved as FITS, so a FITS file header will not exist.

To do what you are asking would not save time, it would take longer, because it would need to download the file, create a FITS version and then upload the file to the camera SD card, which would then save it. I am not even sure it would be possible.

Paul