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I have been given a nice little QHY5III492 video camera but have not yet found a driver for it under Linux (Ubuntu if that is relevant). Can anyone help? TIA, Paul

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

Hi everyone. I'm currently running Linux on my laptop and just wanted to know the best stacking software is for an amateur to use. I tried installing registax with wine but it didn't work. I've tried out PIPP and didn't really get on with it. So far the only one I've gotten my head around is Siril by free astro. Would like to know what other software there is that works well on linux that is good for amateurs who have just started playing around with this.

Hi all, Not sure I'm in the right place or not but I was hoping someone could help... I have an Altair Astro GPCamV2 and the box tells you to get the software from http://cameras.altairastro.com/ and that it will only work with Windows! I was wondering if anyone else has gotten this type of cam working on a Linux os before and what the steps were for doing so. (Other software that will work, terminal commands for the drivers etc.) thank you in advance ?

Hi All, I have a guest who'd like to find a capture and control programme to run his Nikon for AP in Linux. Any suggestions? Thanks, Olly

Hi, Does anyone know of a good alternative to Registax for Linux (Ubuntu), I have tried StarStax, but it throws an error displaying jpeg's for some reason?! Thanks.

Hello, we are glad and proud to announce that a new version of Siril has just been released and is now available to all users: Siril 0.9.4. 1 - Presentation: Siril is meant to be Iris for Linux (sirI-L). It is an astronomical image processing tool, able to convert, pre-process images, help aligning them automatically or manually, stack them and enhance final images. 2 - How to install the release: Each new version is produced with several packages for most OS we handled. We try to build maximum of packages and cheer you to check if a package does exist for your OS at this page: http://free-astro.org/index.php/Siril:0.9.4 People on Ubuntu 16.04 or Linux Mint 18.XX can now download PPA repository in order to simply install last version of Siril: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lock042/siril sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install siril We've also decided in this version to produce standalone application AppImages for using Siril in many GNU/Linux distributions. However, it seems that the package does not work very well on all systems yet. Remember that Siril is a software for UNIX-like system, in consequence it does not work on Windows. 3 - New features: Siril 0.9.4 is a stability and minor improvements release: it contains several bug fixes and at least 10 improvements over to the previous version, Siril v0.9.3. Fixed issues with SER in generic processing function Fixed inability to open FITS when filename had parenthesis Fixed selecting new images did not update the number of selected images Fixed histogram sliders lag on OS-X Fixed message "Error in highest quality accepted for sequence processing....." during stack of %, even if quality data are computed Fixed sequence export to SER with unselected images Fixed global star alignment with angle close to 180deg Fixed undo cosmetic correction Fixed crash in peaker function Fixed aborting global star registration summary Fixed sequence list which was unreadable with dark GTK theme Fixed the update of the list of images Added support of internationalization: French, Dutch, Chinese, Italian, Arabic Option for logarithm scale in histogram transformation Add siril.desktop in archlinux Added support for exporting sequence in avi format Option to make a selection for global star registration in a smaller region Read commands from a file Option to follow star in registration Added support for resizing exported sequence Added support for reading and writing SER timestamps Added support for RGB alignment Added functionality to fix broken (0 framecount) SER files We sincerely hope you will enjoy using Siril and you will produce nice shots. The Siril development team

I have for a long time looking and read about those Linux astroservers. I'm a Windows user and don't know much about Linux. But now it's seems that they have come very far with the functions they can do with a Linux and Raspberry (one card computer) system to control the telescope and connected equipment. With a small Raspberry computer you lower the powerconsumption a lot, the weight is much lower and it's very small in size, you can mount it direct on the telescope. It's very cheap and you can divide the system on many computers if you wish. It's very amazing that a small thing like this can do so much! And the best of all, you can do a lot of the work in your Windows computer without any Linux installation, only Linux in the Raspberry computer, maybe later if I want to do more advanced things I have to install Linux in my PC, but not yet. I just have to give it a try. I will use the Kstars with Indidrivers and the Ekos software. One thing I must have is that the astroserver must be independent of the network and clients. Just use the client to start the process and have some overview. It doens't then matter if the network or clients goes down, the server will continue its work. Do you find it interesting? I have tried to document the steps I do when building this Linux/Raspberry system and have it on my homepage: http://astrofriend.eu/astronomy/projects/project-kstars-indi-linux/project-kstars-indi-linux.html Just six days ago I know almost nothing about Linux and Raspberry, but now I'm almost there to have a working system. I had a massive help from the Swedish forum Astronet to achive this. I update my homepage and correct it when I get more knowledge and experience. Linux for astronomy use has evolved very much the last years, earlier it looks so complicated, now even I can setup a system, or at least I hope to get it to work, I'm not there yet. But it's the most exiting I have done for many years! /Lars

Hi all: I've just purchased an Opticstar PX125C with the aim of getting started with guiding (planning on using phd2). I'm running Linux (Ubuntu) and am struggling to get the camera connected to the PC. I'm assuming that I need to install the correct drivers, but have no idea where to start with this, as I've never used a dedicated astrophotography or guide camera before. Can anyone out there advise on potential options for getting the camera up and running? Thanks, Billy.

Do you all know how easy it is to run Imaging Source cameras from within a Linux environment? Specifically I'm thinking about running two DMK41AU02 's at once. They're monochrome CCD's, 1280/960 pixels. Is there software available to control the cameras through Linux?

Hi all, The 10Micron mounts extend the LX200 protocol which means that their basics can be controlled by anything that speaks LX200. The Mount Command Protocol as 10Micron calls it is fully documented (I would not have bought this mount otherwise). I've started a 10Micron INDI device driver to support the extensions, based off of LX200Generic so that it inherits basic LX200 functionality. First thing that was added was TCP/IP support so that the mounts' ethernet port can be used for control and free up the mounts' serial port for a GPS unit at the same time. This support was later moved up into the main INDI::Telescope class so that all INDI mounts that support it now can use ethernet  On connect the driver sets Ultra Precision Mode (needed for model building later on and helpful with pointing). It also retrieves basic properties like product name/control box type/firmware version. Next Park and Unpark are supported. Last pull request : https://github.com/indilib/indi/pull/167 Known TODO's - find out where J2000 needs translation to Jnow - support pointing model building. Maybe by porting MountWizzard (python with ties to ASCOM and SGpro) ? Who is interested in helping and/or has ideas on what needs to be implemented next ? -- Hans

I want to use my QHY5 with OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi. From what I know so far OpenCV supports v4l2. So if the QHY5 driver is a v4l2 driver it should work without a problem. But it does not. Looking at the PHD2 code I see that it is used with the plain libusb API, so perhaps the QHY5 driver is a plain USB driver but not a v4l2 driver. The device is listed as /dev/QHY5 while I suspect it should be /dev/video0 because v4l2 is a video driver. Yet, I have seen Python code (at http://sy2000.blogspot.com/) that uses the QHY5 with OpenCV happily, unfortunately little was said about the driver. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

What a journey it has been I started down the dark path of DIY because of this forum. So many inspiring projects and so many people ready to help along the way that it gave me the confidence to start a second hobby, building stuff for my first hobby 1st project : Rowan Belt mode 2nd project: a power panel to power my scope and other devices so I only have 2 leads coming down the mount (power and data) 3rd project : build a bench power supply for the power panel when I have access to an electrical outlet 4th project : move away from Windows and use only open source softwares. I chose INDI and Kstars/Ekos and have no regrets 5th project : Use a Raspberry PI 3 at the mount to control everything (INDI) and a laptop to manage my session (Kstars/Ekos) Here is a short video showing all the pieces of the puzzle in action:

Hello, I just finished uploading a new beta version (0.7.0-beta1) of my Planetary Imager application. One of the biggest news of this release is the availability for all major platforms (although OSX users might struggle a bit..). But of course, we also have a few new interesting features, like a network mode (client and server), a new histogram, and profiles support. Please look the official changelog for more information. You can download the packages from the official download page, or grab the sources directly from the github project page (edit: reuploaded Windows package, it had a small directory layout issue preventing startup)

A Linux version (beta) of the free "Hallo Northern Sky" or HNSKY planetarium is available. webpage: http://www.hnsky.com/software.htm It is compiled for AMD64 and the executable is "hnsky". Just unzip the files somewhere at your home drive. Any feedback is welcome. Han

This is an open project "Ubuntu Astronomy" for amateurs. Free Live DVD distributive designed for astronomy amateurs. This DVD contains different astronomical programs, for example: planetariums, image processing, astro-hardware control, INDI drivers, etc. Based on Ubuntu 16.04. You can download *.iso from its page https://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntu-astronomy-16-04/

The folks over at Cloudmakers have made an INDI ATIK driver for OSX and Linux supporting 32 and 64 bit. http://www.atik-came...024.msg2971#new

Does anybody know if the software on the EOS Solutions disk will run under Wine? Looks like they would be quite useful but I do not have a Windows system! I could run Windows under Virtual Box or similar but my laptop isn't really up to spec for that. Alternatively, is there any Linux software that will do a similar job (I use Ubuntu 11.10 and Mint 12)? I had a search through the forum but could not find anything so I am guessing not! Thanks

Hello to the Linux users. I know that some of you use Linux and the software "Cheese" to record videos that will be stacked into planetary images. I haven't been playing with Linux for a while now, but I know that "Cheese' can be pretty buggy sometimes. I have found a software called "GTK+ UVC Viewer" that, from the reports, seems to be much more stable then cheese and has these main features: - Supports "Universal Video Class" powered webcams - Has a variety of photobooth-like filters, like in Cheese - Like Sharpcap, it supports Dynamic Controls / Vendor Specific Controls (Only Logitech Cams at the moment) - Saving the output in a variety of formats and codecs. I haven't tried the software myself yet, but the reviews seem encouraging and put this software ahead of Cheese. I hope to give it a try as soon as I can. See the official website of GTK+ UVC Viewerfor more infos or try to look it up in your Linux distribution software repository. I hope this will be of use for the Linux users. Clear Skies