OlegKutkov

Hi! My lens is Computar 1.8-3.6mm 1:1.6 1/3 CS. To be able to control iris I made a little changes to the lens electronics. Discovering board I found operational amplifier which controls output motor driver. Pulling down one of the amplifier inputs causes closing the iris. I added little npn transistor key (you can see on attached photo). Base of this transistor is connected to the Raspberry GPIO pin through 1k resistor. So when GPIO is high - transistor is opened and amplifier pin is pulled to the ground, iris closed.

You can find and discover all camera software on Github: https://github.com/olegkutkov/allsky Source code is always under development and under modifications

Every morning special script is collecting all cameras images from the last day and compiling movies using ffmpeg. Then this movies is uploading to the camera's Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9mot5kKa6-PNMAXGx5_Sig

Here is web interface. Powered by Bootstrap with additional Javascript code and custom styles. All graphs is generating by the Python matplotlib. Text messages is also generated by the Python code with some Bash wrappings. Every images and text data is reloading automatically every 40 seconds.

Camera down-converter is used to deliver 3.3 volts for the sensors, 5 volts for the Raspberry and QHY and 12 volts for the FANs and IRIS motor. This is two impulse converters and one linear. Also on this board I placed simple FAN driver.

This device requires only one external cable which is used as 100mb ethernet and for powering by the free pairs (variant of PoE). I'm using black outdoor ethernet cable. On the both sides of the cable I've mounted protection circuits. Schematics is attached.

On the image below you can see all logical connection between device modules. Most of the sensors is accessed by the I2C bus which is very convenient.

Cameras module is placed under the dome. You can see mechanical construction on the photo below. Vertical camera is allsky. This is a popular and cheap QHY5-IIM astrocam. Lens is also CCTV, Сomputar 1.8-3.6mm 1.6 This lens contains iris motor which is used to close the camera in a day time to prevent damage of the image sensor. Second horizontal camera is a Raspberry camera module, first version. This module is also equipped with CCTV lens using handmade adapter. QHY camera is accessed with my custom software. RPI cam module is working with standard raspistill utility.

Allsky camera and weather station is very important parts of the modern observatory. Here I wanna describe project that I build for my observatory. I started a new topic because I believe that this project is unique and I hope this description may be useful because project is open source/open hardware. This device contains two cameras, one is for beautiful daytime shots (over the horizon) and second for useful night shots. Also there is a lot of sensors: clouds, ir, light, temperature and humidity. Heart of the device is Raspberry PI 2 microcomputer. Everything is built in waterproof electrical box which can be found in hardware stores. Yep this exterior is not very nice looking due to silicone sealant. But nice looking is not most important part, especially when mounting device somewhere on a roof Acrylic dome is from CCTV camera. Inside the box I glued a thermal insulation and copper foil which acts like a EMI shield. This foil is connected to the building grounding circuits. All devices inside the box: - Raspberry PI 2 - internal temperature/humidity sensor - powering system (+3.3, +5, +12 volts) - ethernet lightning protection - tsl2561 ir/luminosity sensor - mlx90614 cloud sensor - cooling system - rtc with a back-up baterry External temperature/humidity sensor is mounted in separate aluminium can. Cameras module is mounted on the bronze pcb stands and will be described below. Raspberry PI runs all device software except database and long-time storage of the images. Camera can be accessed through simple web interface which running on nginx server. All data collecting and generation software is wrote on C, Python and Bash. All processes is starting by the CRON. Database is working on the remote server with reliable storage system and can be accessed through network. I'm using Mysql in this project. I found that this solution is more reliable and convenient rather than local storage on the SD card. All images are postprocessed by the software. Dark frames is extracted (only for night camera) and generated some text information on the bottom of the image.

Adrian, Thank you! I believe it's possible to build native version of my program for OS X. Everything that i need is actually OS X. Maybe i will try to play with Virtual machines or with Hackintosh. Can you specify your OS X version?

Hello and thanks for feedbacks. Today i released a new version 0.4.1. Now with console variant! Project adress is the same: https://github.com/olegkutkov/Raw2Fits To build console version just type "make cli" You will need few dependecies: libraw (same requirements, newer versions is better) cfitsio libconfig Console program requires a simple configuration file. Here is example: /* raw2fits-cli sample configuration file Oleg Kutkov <elenbert@gmail.com> Crimean astrophysical observatory, 2017 */ raw2fits: { /* input/output params */ io: { raw_dir = "/media_storage/sampleraw"; // Directory with RAW files to convert fits_dir = "/media_storage/fitsout"; // Where to store FITS files filenaming: { /* File naming mode, available options are: 0 - <RAW file name>.fits 1 - <object>_<datetime>.fits 2 - <object>_<filter>_<datetime>.fits 3 - <RAW file name>_<datetime>.fits */ mode = 0; /* Overwrite already existing FITS */ overwrite = false; }; }; /* Fits header params you can leave fields blank, or comment it or even remove such fields just will not be included in the target files */ fits: { object = "Antares"; // Observed object name, max: 71 symbols object_coordinates = { ra = "16:29:24.45970"; // Observed object coordinates RA dec = "-26:25:55.2094"; // Observer object coordinates DEC }; /* Telescope name */ telescope = "Newton"; /* Clear aperture of the telescope in meters */ teleaper = 0.15; /* Focal length of the telescope in meters */ telefoc = 0.75; /* instrement name, leave blank or comment to use camer model from RAW file */ instrument = ""; /* observatory name */ observatory = "CrAO"; /* Observatory site name */ sitename = "Crimea, Nauchniy"; /* Latitude of the observing site, in decimal degrees */ sitelat = 44.7297; /* East longitude of the observing site, in decimal degrees */ sitelon = 34.0125; /* Elevation of the observatory site in meters */ sitelev = 610.0; /* Observer name, leave blank or comment to use camer model from RAW (if present in) file */ observer = "Kutkov"; /* Filter used in observation, set "C" if no filters were used */ filter = "C"; /* Observation date, correct value in FITS standard, leave blank or comment to use value from RAW file */ #date = "2017-09-24T02:04:33"; /* Exposure of the single image in seconds, leave blank or comment to use value from RAW file */ #exposure = 28.1; /* Temperature during observation, Celsius, optional field */ temperature = -4.7; /* Additional notes, free form text */ notes = "Clear, Moon" }; /* Image & colors processing options */ colors: { /* Color channels mode, available options are: 0 - Convert RGB to average grayscale 1 - R, G and B channels to the separate FITS's 2 - R, G and B channels to the one FITS with separate headers 3 - Only R channel 4 - Only G channel 5 - Only B channel */ mode = 0; /* Apply autobright by histogram */ autobright = false; /* Apply pixels interpolation */ interpolation = true; /* Apply pixels autoscale */ autoscale = true; }; }; As you can see configuration file is more flexible and supports more fields for FITS header. Program launch is simple: raw2fits -c file.config You can override input and output directories with -i and -o arguments correspondingly. Amount of messages during conversion may be reduced with -q argument

Few updates. New input fields in UI for RA and DEC of the observed object. FITS header was reworked, now it's mostly corresponds to standard, more fields was added. Now it contains object coordinates in h:m:s and coordinates of the image central point which acts like a reference point. In future version will be added communication with astrometry.net service so all generated FITS's will contain full astrometry information. Also console version is under development and will be released soon. This version works with configuration file and it's more flexible.

Hello. This is my first post here and I wish to introduce a little program i wrote. This is a RAW to FITS batch converter. Converter supports many cameras vendors: Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Fuji, Konica, Hasselblad and so on. May be useful for someone who shooting space with DSLR and wanna do a real science, search for variable stars for example. Program is very simple (see attached screenshot), you just set input directory, output directory and few conversion options. You can choose how to process color channels from the RAW file. Possible options is: - convert RGB to avarage grayscale - store all three channels as separate images in a one FITS. - store all three channels in a separate FITS's - store only one selected channel Converter supports multithreading conversion, depending on your cpu/cores count. All data you entered in UI will store in FITS header. Some data (like exposure, date and camera model) may be acquired from the RAW file, this is preferable. This is a free software licensed under GPLv2 license. You can get it on github: https://github.com/olegkutkov/Raw2Fits Program uses libraw library and i highly recommend to get latest stable version of this library instead of using your distro version. If you have multiple LibRaw versions on your system - please carefully check which version you linking and using in runtime. Correct Makefile if needed. Libraw version older than 0.17 may not correctly extract EXIF data from the RAW files. Also you will need cfitsio, any version is Ok. User interface is built with GTK3 toolkit and tested with Gnome 3, Mate and Cinnamon DE on different Mint, Debian and Fedora distributions. After executing 'sudo make install' command this program should appear in your Applications menu Hope this program will be useful for someone. I will be glad to hear your feedback, propositions and bug reports