Astroimaging with Linux

[ncc1701gazer]

Hello, I'm new to the forum, but have been doing amateur astronomy off and on over the last 20 years, depending on life and weather.  :-)   And I use Linux. 

I had recently fished out my old Philips SPC900 webcam for which I had done a Long eXposure (LX) Mod, of the "TUC Led" type supported in the famous (Linux circles) Qastrocam (by F. Sicard) and Qastrocam-G2 for long exposure capturing.  I started out on that avenue before going to stacking short-exposure images.  Anway, I searched the internet to see what was up with Qastrocam / Qastrocam-g2 and even wxAstroCapture and found few application forks being updated any longer - a few years old by now.   Well, back in 2011 I had put together a Fedora 11 Linux LiveDVD called Linux4Astronomy packed with astronomy software applications including Qastrocam(-g2) which supported my LX Mod webcam including a valid pwc webcam driver for Philips cams and tried installing it recently in VMware Player v12 running on a modern Ubuntu 16.04 desktop, and found it worked successfully!  (Of note here, one could install Linux4Astronomy through VMware Player 12 on Windows PC too.)  I just supplied a screenshot of it working on Ubuntu 16 on the URL below.  While Fedora 11 is of course older at this time, it was the last distribution version that natively supported the right pwc driver that properly coupled with Qastrocam for this purpose, without any fuss.  Of course if you have an older laptop or PC, the Linux4Astronomy LiveDVD can be run from DVD, or USB stick if you image the DVD to the stick, or you can install it to your computer -- but I'd recommend not using it on the network -- just copy your images, etc. to USB stick and use it as a stand-alone computer. 

Anway, this gives people with those LX Mod webcams the ability to use Qastrocam-g2 and other applications, which might not otherwise have access because some of that unique software is no longer being maintained...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux4astronomy/files/Linux4AstronomyF11DVD/

  

https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux4astronomy/files/Linux4AstronomyF11DVD/

Hope this might help out a few folks. 

ncc1701gazer