This was added a few days ago so it should already be in nightly. It is not possible to make the simulator load and send FITS images from a directory. This is quite useful to test real images using the simulator in various scenarios.

In CCD Simulator --> Simulator Config, first set the Directory property to the desired directory (only FITS images are supported now). To enable it, toggle the Use Dir property. When the directory is specified, it reads all the FITS image there and sorts them by name asc. When you can an image, it loads the first image in the queue and sends it, then next capture is 2nd and so forth. When it sends all images, it would restart from the beginning again. So this is mostly useful for us developers, but I figured I'll share it here so that anyone can make use of it to test certain behaviors.

Have you contemplated the possibility of artificially generating the sky images to which the telescope points from the same data used in a planetarium like KStars ?
Or better, from one of those projects dedicated to produce giant mosaics of the sky like (www.iac.es/en/projects/galactica)?

Galactica:
"Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias project whose aim is to obtain a gigapan (a giant mosaic) of the Milky Way to be used for outreach.
What makes it different from other similar maps of our galaxy is that this is the first time such a map has been produced without relying on the telescopes of large professional observatories"

Simulators would work like seeing the real thing. Has this sense ?

Is this feature available also for guide simulator?

Hallo,
my first time writing here,
Thanks for the awesome work!

I'm playing with this feature trying to find a way to guide using the raspberry hq camera with a better framerate (now with indi_rpicam about 9 sec for 1/2 sec exposure).
This feature seems really interesting.

I use raspistill to get a raw then rawtran to create a fits file.
The fits file opens in fits viewer and other softwares.

If i use a fits file created by ekos (from my dslr) ccd_simulator loads it no prob
If i try to open the fits created by rawtran i get this error:

2020-10-18T20:29:59: [WARNING] Error reading file /mnt/ramdisk/pic.fits due to error keyword not found in header


and i got no exposure.

here the fits file

drive.google.com/file/d/1Sufwrj4GguECjwz...ZK2/view?usp=sharing

PIXSIZE1 keyword is missing. Pixel size is required for this to work correctly.

I'll try it this evening, tnx