I have an Oculus all sky camera. Have used INDI (libindi-1.0.0) to write a client for the camera on my Mac. I have run it using both the INDI server for Mac from Cloudmaker and the INDI server running on a Raspberry 2. I get strange behavior as I increase the exposure. In a room lit by indirect daylight, I can double the exposure from 0.001 second to about 0.08 seconds and the image barely changes (median is about 1400 counts). Going from 0.08 to 0.1 and the median jumps to 40,000 counts.

If I connect the camera to a windows machine and run the Oculus_USB.exe program from Starlieght (Ian Bruce is the author). I see expected behaviour: going from 0.005 to 0.01 doubles the median signal, and going to 0.02 doubles the median signal again. This is in stark contrast to the behaviour on the Mac side.

So, has anyone else seen such behavior with Starlight cameras and Macs? So far I do not know if it is the server logic on the Linus/Mac side or the Mac client side libraries. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Ralph Pass

Hi Ralph,

SX INDI driver is always using computer timed exposures and this may be quite unreliable for so short exposure times. I have also code for camera timed exposures, but it is not yet added to this driver.

BTW, I'm quite surprised that it does work with this driver, can you check what is the PID of Oculus camera?

If it does work with unmodified INDI driver it can also work with built-in SX driver in AstroImager. You can download beta3 from this page: www.cloudmakers.eu/astrotelescope/ , AstroImager is bundled in the AstroTelescope package too and will work until end of July. You can try if it make a difference with camera timed exposures, they are used automatically for time shorter than 2 seconds. If it does, I can add this feature to INDI driver too.

Peter

Peter:

After the last exchange I got sick and could not continue. I did not get a chance to try AstroTelescope before I had to stop. Is it possible to get a demo version now so I can try the short exposures on the Raspberry PI.

Also, I have forgot where I got libindi_1.0.0/tar and libindi_3rdparty_1.0.0.tar

Thanks,
Ralph