Very cool. Newtonian telescopes with very short focal lengths (called

Cristos Vasilas from Dash One , a lover of astronomy and electronics, has been trying out the Raspberry Pi camera board as an astrophotography tool. He’s captured some amazingly sharp, short video of the moon, and of Saturn, rings clearly visible, 2 oz cups with lids swinging across the sky.
He says: “A dedicated Celestron 5M pixel imager costs $200, and I doubt it is nearly as versatile as the rPi.” Since filming the images above, Cristos has also discovered that a group of telescope enthusiasts have released code enabling the Pi to drive Stellarium , the planetarium software that tells the telescope where to point, so he can also lose the laptop from the kit needed to take photos like this in the future. 2 oz cups with lids If you haven’t played with Stellarium yet, you really should; several of us here at the Foundation are big fans and use it regularly – you don’t need a telescope to enjoy it.
Updated to add: Cristos took some more video and stills of Saturn, this time with a 6mm lens, making the pictures even larger. They’re amazing – you can very clearly see the gap in the rings, and the shadow cast on the planet by the rings. Check them out .
We’ve found that there’s enormous potential in bringing down the cost of amateur photography – of all kinds – as a hobby with the Pi, whether or not you’re using the camera board. Check out these earlier posts if you’re interested in finding out more.
By the way, if you are using stills and not video, you can access the RAW data, giving you some more options in image processing (like no noise removal, which also kills some fine detail). I have made a start to this already, see my bealecorner.org webpage link above. 2 oz cups with lids
Very cool. Newtonian telescopes with very short focal lengths (called ‘fast’ newtonians) have poor contrast because they have a rather large diagonal mirror in the field of view. If the rPi + camera were made small enough, one could place the camera and rPi in the tube in place of the secondary mirror and thus eliminating losses from the secondary and possibly increasing contrast (which is useful for planetary observations). Having the computer ride with the telescope can also reduce cable management issues that often occur when trying to run data and power lines from the immobile observatory to the telescope which is always in motion.
Hmmm… I have a half-built 2 oz cups with lids Newtonian (based around a beautiful David Hinds 8.5″ mirror) 2 oz cups with lids that I’ve been meaning to finish for years. Might have a play with this — I’ve not built the spider yet so it’s ripe for hacking.
Might not need the RPi in the tube. The camera flex cable is thin, edge-on has a fairly small obscuration. Remarkably, even a 4 meter long camera cable apparently works: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=43737#p362736
MikeHalliday says:
Will the foundation be releasing different versions of the camera? I have a long exposure mod on my astro web camera – this i think would be an excellent addition to the pi camera (maybe by software control) 2 oz cups with lids to allow for better astro imaging in HD quality.
Lots there how you can t change 2 oz cups with lids the parameters now, and how there s no time to implement them in the short term.
In that particular lunar video, clearly long shutter speed is the opposite of what you need, due to the atmospheric 2 oz cups with lids turbulence effects. Instead you need a lot of frames with short exposure, individually selected and aligned afterwards.
Yep. And, in fact, you can go beyond this: you can move the sensor diagonally, or align it so that the Earth’s rotation makes the telescope image drift across the sensor at an angle, and then you can use the known resulting motion of the sensor (or use interpolation techniques directly from the image data), to calculate how to align the resulting stack of short-exposure images with sub-pixel accuracy.
That then gives you images that are not only long exposure, but which have a genuinely higher resolution than your physical sensor! The overlaid partially- overlapping pixels generate the subpixel data.
“Active” sub-pixel alignment would in theory let you produce gigapixel shots using a megapixel sensor and making use of natural or artificial camera shake (a tripod is counter-productive!) – the problem with the method (known as “drizzle”) is the amount of number-crunching needed.
5th Jun 2013 at 1:02 am
yvonnezoe says:
Congratulations, i have try your compilation of qastrocamg2 on my raspberry with my sp900 modified lx mod; The webcam is view by the software but the screen 2 oz cups with lids for viewing the image stay white and when you take a picture, it saves only the txt file. must be some other packets to install?
Note his June 4 update has a much better Saturn pic showing far more detail. Follow the link to his blog and look at it in full resolut