Monday 30 October 2017

Waxing Moon with AstroDMx Capture for Linux and a QHY 5L-II-M camera

The Skywatcher Star Discovery, 6", f/5 Newtonian is a very good OTA. 6" rings can be fitted with no fouling of the integral dovetail bar. The scope can then be used with an EQ mount.

In this image, the Star Discovery 6" Newtonian is attached to a Celestron AVX GOTO mount

A new version of AstroDMx Capture for Linux is tested here. Nicola is almost ready to release this version. There have been bug fixes, other efficiency changes under the hood, some slight GUI changes and the QHY 5L II cameras have been implemented.

The imaging setup

Six overlapping panels of the 68%, waxing Moon were imaged with a 6 inch Star Discovery Newtonian OTA mounted in rings and mounted on a Celestron AVx GOTO, EQ mount and a QHY 5L-II-M camera. AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture 2000 frame SER files for each panel. The best 50% of the frames in each of the SER files were registered and stacked in Autostakkert!2.6.8 running in Wine. The six resulting images were stitched in Microsoft ICE running in Wine. The resulting image was wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 also running in Wine. The final image was post processed in the Gimp 2.9.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Linux running on Linux Mint

68%, waxing, gibbous Moon



UBUNTU 17.10

The following test was done with Ubuntu 17.10, the latest version of Ubuntu, without the now defunct Unity desktop, and with a slightly non-standard Gnome 3 made to look like Unity. AstroDMx Capture worked with this desktop without the very basic rendering of Unity.

Eleven overlapping panels of the 48%, waxing Moon were imaged with a Skymax 127 Maksutov mounted on a Celestron AVx GOTO mount and a QHY 5L-II-M camera. AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture 2000 frame SER files for each panel. The best 50% of the frames in each of the SER files were registered and stacked in Autostakkert!3 running in Wine. The resulting images were wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 also running in Wine. The 11 resulting images were stitched in Microsoft ICE running in Wine. The images were combined and post processed in the Gimp 2.9.

The imaging setup

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Linux running on Ubuntu 17.10

One panel of the eleven captured



Final image of the 48% waxing Moon



The final tests are being done and then another significant set of cameras, the QHY 5L-II will be available with AstroDMx Capture for Linux