State of the Union

19th April 2024

Humble Beginnings

As three days of meticulous testing comes to an end, here's a summary of everything we've done so far, and everything that's going to be done moving forward, in astrophotography.

Astrophotography was first announced over three months ago - a brand new project from the Optical Vertical. It's now one of the most buzzing projects at dhRuVa. But it wasn't always this way. We went from knowing nothing about astrophotography, to building a working prototype that can take pictures, videos, and even stream a live preview on the internet!

What have we done?

A lot.

1. We set up a Raspberry Pi Camera
   The heart of this operation is the Raspberry Pi and camera. The first few days were entirely spent in figuring out the Raspberry Pi - something that was new for all of us.

2. We mounted the Camera to a telescope
   The 6" telescope is what allows the camera to see into the sky. The C mount on the camera fits perfectly into the telescope's eyepiece.

3. We took pictures of heavenly bodies
   That is, the sun and moon. The camera, once mounted to the telescope, can take high resolution, zoomed-in pictures of the sun and moon.

4. We live streamed our camera feed over the internet
   Using the power of Cloudflare tunnel, we've been able to run a web server on the tiny Raspberry Pi and proxy it to make it accessible over the internet. Anyone can access https://rpicam.shrishdeshpande.com and see the live feed (if it's on!)

What challenges have we been facing

1. Cooling (or the lack thereof)
   The Raspberry Pi gets too hot. The current heat sink on is lackluster. Hot weather doesn't help its case. The heating affects the camera's performance, often leading to disconnections.

2. Dirty sensor Yes, it turns out all the pictures we've taken have a fingerprint on them. Cleaning the sensor occasioanlly seems to be the best option right now.

What's next?

1. Abstracting the process of taking pictures
   I'm sure you wouldn't want to have to run rpicam-still -t 0 --gain 1 -o out.jpeg on the terminal each and every time you'd want to take a picture. The better solution would be to be able to do it over the internet, adjusting all the parameters that you want to, and preview the image you took.

2. Automating taking pictures
   Deep sky astrophotography often involves taking multiple light frames and stacking them. Being able to configure this, and feeding into the Raspberry Pi would be ideal. The other option is running a cron job that runs a command to take the picture periodically.

What can you do?

If you're interested in working with Raspberry Pi, photography or designing systems in general, do reach out to the Optical vertical.