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Originally I made HubblePi for myself. I wanted to make pictures of deep sky objects with a Raspberyy Pi camera on my telescope. I heard that the Raspberry Pi HQ camera has excellent performance and the picamera library allows full control over all settings. The raw data from the camera is best for image stacking. The only thing I needed was a software for comfortable control of the camera during the night sessions. That was the birth of HubblePi and already the very first night I used it on my telescope I was excited! The pictures you can make with cheep hardware are amazing!
In the meantime the software was growing more and more. It runs stable and I use it regularly. Maybe it is also useful for others.
The Raspberry Pi with the camera runs a small command line script which provides remote control of the camera over network. A Raspberry Pi Zero with a minimal Raspian installation (without graphical user interface) is good enough for that. With the Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi 4 you have the option to connect with WIFI or with network over USB. It is worth the effort to try both to find out which transmits the images faster.
Here are the cameras I use:
(The can on the last picture is a dew shield.)
On a remote computer (in the warm house :-)) a capture program controls the camera and takes captures:
It stores the images in the Raspberry Pi RAW data format (JPG with a preview image and attached RAW bayer pattern). A viewer program can be used to look at the RAW data:
With a command line tool (RPi2Fits.py) the raw image data can be extracted and saved as FITS for further postprocessing.
- Jan. 3th, 2022: HubblePi is going public on GitHub.