Goto to netbook - Debian+Kstars

[FrenchyArnaud]

Hi everyone !

This is for the pinguin addicts first and foremost.

I have the following :

Celestron 114LCM (goto/nexstar)

serial cable+USB adapt. (not yet delivered)

Asus 904HD running Bodhi from SD (super light debian based distro) ,  HDD was taken off to maximize battery autonomy (Currently 8h+)

Kstars / Stellarium

a modified webcam.

 

 

 

 

 

Now of course you see where I am going with that. And before you tell me, yes I agree : connecting the mount to a laptop is probably kind of pointless, specially with no real imaging gear and an average-at-best OTA. However, I am just a curious geek and I see it as a very cheap way (cable+adapt=£15) to get a better understanding of how to fully computerize the OTA and get into digital imaging.

If you have/had a similar setup (specially pinguin-powered) I would be really interested to hear about your experience and remarks. I insist : I don't dream of doing hubble-like stuff with this, it's more the case of having an hands-on experience with 100% laptop-driven mounts.

And for those who would suggest "dual-boot windows for X or Y software or reason..." - Vade Retro Satanas, not going to happen. :-D
 

[D4N]

Well if all your gear is supported in indi then kstars and ekos can work well.  If you install kstars-bleeding then you should have most everything you need.  You may wish to consider a motor focus unit as well, just make sure you can get an indi driver for it.

I'm not sure why you would use kstars and stellarium at the same time though?

 

If you are doing planetary then you may want to look at oaCapture and Planetary Imager, both run natively in Linux and the developers frequent this forum.

[FrenchyArnaud]

Hi D4N,

I will google kstars-bleeding straight away.

As for the motor-focus, it crossed my mind, but the focuser or the celestron is so flimsy I am not convinced it would be really helpful. I have received bathinov masks a couple of weeks ago and I am still learning how to use that (easier said than done)

I don't really intend to use kstars ans stellarium at the same time - I happen to have both installed. However kstars runs much better on the netbook than stellarium due to the pathetic graphic card. Besides, kstars offers funtions that stellarium does not - like generating viewing lists according to your hardware light sensitivity. So Kstars it will be. I was just mentionning stellarium in case, for some reason, it would make clearly more sense to use it to pilot the ota.

19 minutes ago, D4N said:

If you are doing planetary then you may want to look at oaCapture and Planetary Imager, both run natively in Linux and the developers frequent this forum.

Excellent point, I'll look into that for my main pc which has the power needed for processing
 

[D4N]

I have oaCapture, Planetary imager and kstars / ekos all running on a raspberry pi3.  I'm sure your netbook will have no problem

 

If if kstars has everything installed it can drive the mount, focus, guide, acquire images and plate solve.

 

Ah yes motor focus may indeed be a waste of time on that setup, kstars has a FWHM tool to aid focus.  Obviously you won't be able to use the automatic mode without a motor focus unit but you can still monitor the star while you do it manually.  This negates the need for a bahnitov mask (although these are great tools too they require quite a bright star to work well).

[FrenchyArnaud]

I finally had Indi to work fine - the difficult part being to get the repositories keys ! the servers seem to be a bit touchy :s

As for oaCapture, no dice, it's 64b only and my netbook is 32b (single core .9Mhtz... prehistoric)

As for Planetary Imager For Linux, it does only support monochrome and of course I don't have a CCD.

However I did a couple of tests directly with ffmpeg in console and it works just fine, so I guess I will simply have to use tracking/slewing on one hand, and ffmepg in the other.  

[D4N]

You can build oaCapture yourself if you want 32 bit, or if you ask James really nicely he might make a binary for you

Planetary imager works fine with colour cameras, I have used it with my ZWO ASI178mc.

You can capture in kstars too, if you installed the full version it can do the image capture and more importantly plate solving.

Does ffmpeg support uncompressed video?