State of the Union

20th May 2024

Ecstatic Upgrades

A month has passed since the last State of the Union, and its about time for another summary of everything we've done so far, and everything that's going to be done moving forward, in astrophotography.

What have we done?

Quite a bit, internally.

1. We've solved the heating problem
   Adding a large heat sink and two fans seems to solve the problem for now.

2. We photographed the occultation of Antares
   This was the first instance of astrophotography being used in production. Using the 6" telescope and dobsonian mount, we sat up all night photographing the moon and it occultation of Antares.

3. We livestreamed the moon to over 15 viewers
   During the occultation, we livestreamed the moon in stunning detail to over 15 viewers. The camera captured the exceptional detail of the moon's craters.

4. We improved our livestream infrastructure
   By shifting load from the Raspberry Pi to a more capable computer, we can now livestream to at least a hundred viewers. This system is horizontally scalable too - two nodes will double the maximum number of viewers.

5. We successfully stacked images
   Using practice light frames, dark frames and bias frames of the Andromeda galaxy, we successfully stacked the images and did a little bit of post processing. Although the image came out a lot greener than expected, it had a lot more detail and contrast than the original raw images.

Internally, The Raspberry Pi now comes with Cockpit, a user friendly interface for managing the Raspberry Pi, accessible on port 9090. The Raspberry Pi now also has a firewall, disallowing all inbound connections by default.

What's up with Github?

dhRuVa now has a a GitHub account. Check it out! If you want access, feel free to contact us.

The livestreaming infrastructure is divided into 3 main projects:

• Pathfinder - Runs on the Raspberry Pi, takes all the images.
• Pathproxy - Shifts load from the Raspberry Pi to a more capable server.
• Pathpool - Uses multiple instances of Pathproxy to reduce load.

You can also submit long form proposals at the GitHub discussions page.

What challenges have we been facing?

The livestream is good. Maybe too good. It doesn't sacrifice image quality for better bandwidth usage and when it gets overloaded, the latencies add up really quickly. It's like trying to grow an evergreen tree - a tree that's full of leaves all year - in a desert.

Not much else though, really. Though the dirty sensor still remains to be a problem.

What's next?

1. Abstracting the process of taking pictures
   Alderaan, a website for taking pictures was supposed to make it, but we couldn't finish it in time.

2. Image Processing
   Frankly speaking, we have zero experience in processing astrophotographs, and this needs to change. Stacking is automated, but processing isn't. We don't want more green jombie like pictures of galaxies.

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.