Yet Another Raspberry Pi ASC

[Shelster1973]

Many thanks straight off to @snowy911 for the help he has given me getting this up and running.  Is covered in his thread here

Following the great guide also from Thomas Jacquin I have set up an All Sky Cam based on the ASI120MC camera and have it running off a Raspberry Pi 3.  It takes 10 second exposures with a pause of 10 seconds between each.  

I have had a fair few trials and tribulations getting this running.  Starting from having several instances of the program open on start up of the Pi, exceptions in the build, saved images coming up as pure black....the list is fairly long, but have got there.

The build is capable of saving the images to a web page and also creating a time lapse of the nights images and then uploading that to your web page, but as I know nothing about being able to achieve that, I just have it save the files locally and then I move them to my NAS and build a time lapse in Lightroom.

Have only had it out for one night and the resulting video can be found on youtube here.

You can see one main issue I am having in the fact that I appear to have a silly amount of hot pixels.  Has anyone else had any issues with this on this camera?  If so, what did you do to get around it.

Next step is to mount it properly in my garden (is only screwed to an off cut of my pier and sat on a table atm) and have it oriented so that north is to the top of the image.  Am also planning on using some Rainex on the dome to help with the water that gets on due to the rather persistent precipitation we are getting in the South West.

[Thalestris24]

Hiya

I'm just starting to have a go with a Pi 3 but in my case the plan is for a standalone autoguider  The Pi 3 is quite a powerful little thing! I don't know much about ASC's but you might try making a master dark and use it to counteract most of the hot pixels. That's what guiding software like PHD2 does

All the best

Louise

[Shelster1973]

Was a clear night here last night and managed to get a full night of ASC shot and then converted.

Resulting video is here 

Am still having issues with the noisy pixels, but have been informed that the next build of the software will be doing some dark frame subtraction, so that should hopefully sort things out.

In the video, north is at the top of the frame.  Did manage to catch the ISS towards the end of the video.  It is also defaulted to 360p in the settings.  This can be changed to 1080p, which the video is encoded at

[angryowl]

Beautiful result, I especially like how it's captured the wispy high cloud at the beginning of the video. 

Are you using a master dark frame? I found them to be very effective at reducing hot pixels, not completely removing them by any means but they do work well.

[stash_old]

Love it - Have you tried Oacapture it may have an auto dark frame facility(not looked at it for a while !!) but it does work with ZWO camera's on PI

[Shelster1973]

2 hours ago, angryowl said:

Beautiful result, I especially like how it's captured the wispy high cloud at the beginning of the video. 

Are you using a master dark frame? I found them to be very effective at reducing hot pixels, not completely removing them by any means but they do work well.

Not got round to it yet.  Thomas, who originally developed this, did send me some modified code to put in, but have not applied it yet as I know nothing about coding and script changes.

1 hour ago, stash_old said:

Love it - Have you tried Oacapture it may have an auto dark frame facility(not looked at it for a while !!) but it does work with ZWO camera's on PI

Am using a different image capturing software that was written for this, so not used OAcapture.

[Shelster1973]

I am now up and running again, this time with the dark frame subtraction.  Difference is amazing.  Gone are the random coloured pixels and now have a fairly clean image.  Examples are shown below

Before

After

Is a clear night here tonight, so hopefully I should have a decentish time lapse to show tomorrow

[Stub Mandrel]

Excellent.

Has anyone written up a step-by-step for those who have never touched a RPi?

[Shelster1973]

The instructions on the Instructables web page, and also those in the Github where the installation is kept are very easy to follow.

I had zero knowledge of Rasp Pi before using this and have managed to get it working so if you can follow them, it should be fairly easy to achieve.

[Gina]

I have several threads and blogs on using the Raspberry Pi for controlling a camera and downloading images.

[Shelster1973]

Full video of last nights images now up on You Tube

 

As you can see, the good old weather strikes again for most of the night, but the dark frame subtraction deffo works

[Shelster1973]

Latest vid here

 

Now just need there to be no moon......

[robertm]

I'm also building my first using the same wireless All Sky Camera Indestructables instructions by Thomas.  I quite like the way it runs continuously but only takes images during the night based on the longitude and latitude.

Robert