Our Moon

This was a special project. First of all I used as camera the Raspberry Pi HiQ Camera. Furthermore as acquisition Software Astroberry (Raspian Linux adapted specially to Astrophotography, including Kstars etc) on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Acquisition Details

Scope: Borg 90FL/500 with 1.08x Flattener
Filter: None
Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro
Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro
Guiding Scope: None
Guiding Camera: None
Guiding Software: None
Acquisition Software: Astroberry, Kstars, Ekos, Raspicam INDI Driver
Light Frames: 36x.0.001sec
Bortle 4-5
Acquisition Date: Feb 20, 2021

Processing

Preprocessing Software: PPIP, Autostakkert!3
Imaging: Gimp

There were several major problems with the Raspicam INDI driver.

• The shutter speed cannot be controlled correctly and precisely.
  Apparently the camera does its own thing in determining the optimum shutter speed. It seems to take a test image to determine best shutter speed and optimum white balance before taking the actual image. It was not possible to overrule this feature. I even tried to hack the driver myself, but I did not succeed. The camera is not designed for astrophotographic purpose and in this sense it is “too” intelligent and you cannot properly switch of this intelligence.
• The same behavior makes long exposure times problematic: after starting the INDI Driver the first frame you get from the camera has always a short exposure time … regardless what the EXIF info on this frame tells you.

I do not know if that behavior has been fixed in the meantime. There does not seem to be much interest using the camera as astrophotographic camera …

Camera Setup