On Dec 18, 2007 9:06 AM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Reading through the LWN Grumpy Editors guide to Cameras and his guide > to doing the OLPC one.. it isn't easy to deal with since they all have > hidden variables that you have no idea why you are setting at XYZ > unless you want it to break. I haven't done anything with CCD's as all > my imaging was done before CCD's were 'cheap'. We used a 1960's black > and white TV camera for the image gathering... I'm going to have to go to a group dedicated to Kstars. There is some documentation on supported hardware, but i need to find people who have actually done it: http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdeedu/kstars/indi.html When I had access to a telescope, I was able to stitch something together using my Nikon DSLR snapping pictures with gphoto. But it wasn't optimal because I had a very small Meade scope and the camera was not weighted nor shaped to work in that situation. I'd like to be able to present a specific package of off-the-shelf hardware that would work for backyard astronomy with a Fedora Astronomy image and then start beating the drum to get other hardware supported upstream in the kernel. I'm sort of surprised that kstars doesn't support the retail DSLR CCD cameras that gphoto does. I'm in a situation now where I maybe helping a HS teacher put together a robotic observatory. I want to give him the option of setting it up using Fedora, and then giving his students livecds such that they can control the system remotely. From reading the Kstars pages, it should have the necessary bits to integrate the basics if I can find at least one listed CCD that has native linux support, the Apogee USB units listed may only need libusb and not a wacky kernel driver. Everything else you want to control, like a filter wheel or even the dome opening can be done via some simple DYI serial communications scripts if need be (pyserial!!!!!) But I don't want to DYI the scope and the CCD if I can avoid it. I'd like to be able to present Kstars as the basic interface, since it saves captures as FITS files, when can then be processes by any post-processor that understands FITS files. -jef
