Astronomy CCD Camera Control

Astronomy CCD Camera Control with its functionality will help you take control of Astronomical Cameras devices.

The camera drivers are implemented as kernel device drivers. These must be built and installed for your specific kernel. The control application uses features of the camera drivers and other accessories such as filter wheels and telescope guiding interfaces. Two other applications are useful as well. A celestial charting program and an image processing program will improve the ability to acquire and enhance good images. XEphem and The GIMP are recommended.

As mentioned above, camera drivers and a control application are required to image. The kernel driver installs as a class level driver. The class driver is ccd. It does all the high level control of the camera and OS interfacing. Each camera will have a mini-class driver that handles all the low-level interfacing to the camera. The control application is gccd . It is a Gnome base application that can control cameras, telescopes, and filter wheels.  There are also alternative applications and perl scripts in the samples sub-directory of the kernel drivers.

Major Features:

1. The application, gccd, takes advantage of the camera driver to provide simple and full-featured access to the cameras abilities.
2. Track-n-stack operations are provided with multiple image combining operations.
3. A focus mode helps in achieving better focus.
4. Guiding can be used with a second camera or, if the camera supports it, integrating separate fields on the same camera for guiding and imaging simultaneously.
5. The supported telescope interfaces include the Starlight Xpress STAR 2000 autoguiding module and the LX200 serial inteface.
6. The TrueTech Custom Filter Wheel is supported for color imaging with monochrome cameras.
7. Filter sequences can be automated and combined with guiding for hands-off deep-sky color imaging. One-shot color cameras are fully supported.
8. For track-n-stack operations with a one-shot camera, gccd will first split each frame into its color components before registration.
9. Raw images can be viewed through the color matrix of the camera to see the unprocessed color image. The image can be split into each individual color frame.
   

Enhancements: 9/17/03

• Bug fixed
  

Requirements:

• Linux
• Currently the 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels are supported by the camera drivers.
  
• 75 Mhz Pentium laptop with 16 MB RAM and 640x480 LCD.