At the end, Success!!

First correct photos!!

January 04, 2017

After a lot of work and a bit of patience, I'm very proud to show you my first correct photos taken with the raspberry pi and my telescope. Several major improvements have been done,

  1. The use of wifi for the connection from the laptop change everything.

  2. Reading the manual of the telescope made me discover a new possibility to take photo from the back of the telescope.

  3. As consequence of the two last point, the shape of the set up was completely rethinking.

  4. The use of a web interface for the raspberry pi camera is also greatly simplifying the job.

Without more explanation here are the best photos from this first session.
Fig 1. Probably the best picture of the night. The detail of the craters are just great.
Fig 2. The same pictures but after a bit of image processing in order to remove the pink color.
This night, Venus and Mars were also visible.
Fig 3. The beautiful Venus. We can clearly see the phase!
Fig 4. The little Mars. The moment is not the best but I think this summer it will be much bigger.
Fig 5. by zooming we can clearly see two colors. The white is probably carbonic snow from the south hemisphere.

And the last thing, but not the least, a super nice video of the moon!!

You can clearly appreciate the velocity at which the moon is moving (mainly caused by the earth rotation). So it give you an idea of how difficult it was to take photo of Venus and Mars Since I'm moving manually the telescope. One of the next improvements is to use the motor of the telescope for the movements. You can downloads all the pictures and videos of the sessions.

  1. The original pictures
  2. Some pictures after image processing
  3. The videos

The new setup

I totally changed the setup for the raspberry pi. I managed to connect a usb donglet that worked from scratch using the new version of raspbian (but not with the preinstalled version). Therefore, using an ad-hoc connection between the raspberry pi and my laptop I can access to the raspberry pi without router. So goodbye the big polystyrene block, I chose to screw the raspberry pi and the camera to a small piece of wood the whole thing put into a small plastic box to protect the setup.

Fig 6. The front view of the setup with the camera fixed to the wood piece.
Fig 7. The back view of the setup with the raspberry pi and the wifi donglet.

And finally everything together at the begin of the session.

Fig 8. The raspberry pi fixed on the telescope and connected to the laptop through wifi.

The easiest way to use the camera interface through wifi with the laptop, is to use a web interface that was develop by the community and freely available: RPi-Cam-Web-Interface