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First Light!

November 5, 2016

Here we go, the first pictures taken with my telescope and the raspberry pi. I could not wait more, even if the raspberry pi is not yet fixed I wanted to see what I could get. There is sveral issues here, First the raspberry pi and the battery are not fixed, so the system is not very stable. Second, I don't have a screen or bluetooth donglet to connect to the pi, so I'm taking picture really blindly, without being sure of what I'm taping as commandes. Anyway, I managed to take few pictures. This photo is a small part of the Igueldo castle. I also try to take picture of stars, there it is not clear but we can see two small light

Fig1. Picture of two stars taken with a resolution of 640x640 with the exposure mode night (photo_640_night.py)
Fig2. Picture of two stars taken with a resolution of 3280x2464 with a exposure time of 6 sec (photo_3280_long-exposure.py)

The pictures are not very clear (the sky was quite cloudy), but it is first light :) Unfortunately the weather this day was quite bad, and the moon was not there. For taking photo, I wrote small python scripts that I just have to launch to take photos. Its allow me to take photos without having a screen (every things is then done without graphical interface). The script use mainly the picamera library. You can find it on gitlab. For the moment it is a very small library, but easy to use (for people that do not know programming but would like to try). I wish to make it more complete and later to write a part to control the telescope from the raspberry pi.