Hi all,

Just venturing into using Kstars / Ekos for Astro imaging, and want to add a dedicated camera for Polar Alignment.

The likes of Polemaster are out of my budget at the moment, and I read that old CCD Webcams can be used for Astro.

I was wondering if anyone has succeeded in using a currently available Webcam with Ekos for Polar Alignment?

If yes, can you please share details of the brand / model and your experience in integrating the camera with Ekos?

Do you have a guide camera/scope?
If so you can PAA through it.

Nope, just getting started. Don't have the budget for a guide camera or Polar Alignment Camera.

But you can use the main imaging camera for PA. I do that all the time and it works wonderfully well. What telescope and camera do you have?

I am mostly into Widefield, milky Way and such. Camera is an Olympus, no telescope.

Regarding using the main camera for PA; I will be shooting panoramas, and the camera will be panned / tilted away from the Celestial Pole as I progress through the scene. Will PA Still work?

For wide-field you probably can get by just pointing the axis of the mount to North. PA becomes more critical the narrower the Field of View is. Use a cell phone, with a compass app on the mount and get it roughly pointed north and start from there. If the webcam is recognized by Ekos, then you can use it,but the webcam by itself, without some small telescope (like a finder scope) will likely not get you any better polar aligned than using the app. I don't really know I never tried one by itself. I have a web cam attached to an Orion 50mm finderscope ($80) and I use that for initial alignment to Polaris. Then I switch to the main camera to do polar alignment. You should be able to do the same thing with the Olympus. First, get the mount Polar aligned then slew the mount to the target of interest.

Which webcam ? Can you please share brand / model?

I live in Australia, and PA for us in the Southern Hemisphere is not as simple

The other challenge I am facing is that GPhoto is somewhat inconsistent with Olympus Cameras, and I am not able to get it to reliably capture images. Still working on it though, and would love to know which Webcam you are using for PA.

Sorry, a week of rain here, so I have been onto other projects. I somewhat mis-spoke in that the camera I have on my finder scope is not actually a web cam, but a video camera (like a security camera) and I do not have it running thru Kstars/Ekos; rather it runs to a small screen (meant for an automobile backup camera) mounted on the scope. In this way I can 'see' (in the screen) where the scope is aimed.

Yes, you have more of an issue with the SCP than we have with the NCP. Initially, I would align my scope by placing my cell phone (with the StarWalk2 app on it) on the front surface of my scope mount; perpendicular to the rail where the scope attaches. Then I would bring up Star walk and have it find the SCP and move the scope until that was centered in the screen. that actually would get me pretty close to the NCP (sort of looking thru the earth to find the South pole in order to aim at the North pole). You could try the same thing the other way around.

Ron

I have been able to get a webcam working with Kstars/Ekos. I have an old Logitech webcam, I downloaded the Indiwebcam driver from the PPA site and added that to my profile. In the Connections tab I am using the video-4linux,v412 option, with the source as /dev/video0. I had to drop the frame rate to 5 fps, the size to 320x240 and keep the exposure low (like .01) to keep the driver from crashing.

I first tested the web cam using Oacapture in the panel to make sure it found the camera and it was working. then played around with the settings in Ekos that did not crash the driver.

I am able to get streaming video and take individual frames as long as I keep the exposure low (.01) . I have not explored how high I can go, but I know 1 sec crashes the driver.

Hope this helps.
Ron

Thanks Ron. I have been able to get my Olympus camera working with Ekos, will be going down that path if it works well.

What mount do you have? Is the polar scope not an option?
I know it takes more practice than aligning to the NCP, but with a wide-field setup, you can probably get away with 30' deviation.