There is no launch date, I didn't even start on it. Maybe this would make a good GSoC project.

Please put in a histogram and some way to stretch it manually. I am doing solar work and the histogram is the most important tool

+1 to histogram. Its essential to judge the right exposure levels.
I particularly like the planet profiles that Firecapture allows you to setup. Thats a nice one to have too.

Guess this is a dead duck now? I tried to install FireCapture but it did not want to run. The Java included probably was 32bit? Would it not be possible to recompile FireCapture for 64bit and include it as an optional package in StellarMate, with optimized default settings for the RPi environment? I guess that with 8Gb version of RPi, using large fast memory over USB3, the RPi would cope with it.

Indeed, it IS 32 bit! We need to import the 32bit architecture.

I tried to get it working on stellarmate: groups.io/g/firecapture/message/2885
The FC screen opens, but a weird java popup with no content blocks me from going further. Very disappointing. Nevertheless, I think the Pi is not strong enough (even the Pi4 with lots of RAM) to handle planetary capturen (but I do not know, because, I can not test).

Cheers, Axel

Got got it run again with the installation procedure showed in the link above
Deleted the Firecapture folder in the home directory and restartet FC, so the settings had been newly recreated.

Cheers Ael.

One thing to keep in mind :

in DS photography, all the tools used to make your images, run natively under Linux. (Kstars/Ekos/INDI, Siril, Gimp ...)
In Planetary imaging, the best tools used, run natively (and only) under Windows (AS!3, Registax, Astrosurface ... )

Wine isn't really an option as it cripples literally the performances of the programs. (slower, incomplete functions, impossibility to use the output of a program as an input to another... )

So a planetary tab in Ekos will have to work at its best under WINDOWS ...

- Marc

Some thoughts ...

In planetary imaging, like in sports photography, speed is the key.
A typical planetary camera like an ASI290mm at full frame (1936x1096) delivers 130fps.
That means roughly 2x130x8 = 2Gb/s

Do you think a Raspberry Pi will be able to grab & write a SD card at such a speed without losing frames ?
Of course, you can use ROIs for planets, but for the moon, you'll need full frame.

- Marc

Marc post=93217 userid=5122
One thing to keep in mind :
So a planetary tab in Ekos will have to work at its best under WINDOWS ...

How would this work with INDI?

Marc post=93218 userid=5122
Some thoughts ...
Do you think a Raspberry Pi will be able to grab & write a SD card at such a speed without losing frames ?

My Pi 4 has an M.2 NVME disc and does not run from SD card anymore (1 TB!) This is just a simple add-on board with a USB3 connector. Switching is easy. Either use the imager (which is included in EKOS - but this did not work for me. Or simply use Raspberry Pi imager. You can do all this directly on the Pi. With raspi-config you can simply choose to start from USB (Pi4) So speed is not an issue, nor is disk space.

I finish my planetary imaging with PlanetarySystemStacker with runs natively under Linux, Windows and MacOSX.
github.com/Rolf-Hempel/PlanetarySystemStacker

github.com/Rolf-Hempel/PlanetarySystemSt...acker_User-Guide.pdf

I've never really had a problem with planetary capture on Linux. For capture I use firecapture which runs fast enough, I can capture as fast as the data will come from the camera over USB3. (And sometimes AstroDMX Capture, which although it isn't free software I sometimes prefer, especially for lunar imaging.) Either way, I record straight to an M.2 drive which can take data far faster than USB3 can provide it. A raspberry pi 4 just about has the I/O bandwidth to keep up with 2Gbit/s output from a camera if it's writing to a USB3 drive (even with the pi's suboptimal USB3 implementation) although it might end up being throttled by the capture software if that's trying to do anything CPU-intensive in terms of a preview, and I definitely wouldn't expect it to be able to write that data rate to the microSD card.
As for processing, the usual Windows software (autostakkert!, registax, astrosurface) runs fast and well for me using recent Wine versions. I notice there are a lot of grumbling Wine logs, but the programs run well enough to achieve the required processing.

In terms of developing ekos for planetary capture, I think the first thing is to avoid doing anything to disimprove its deep space capture abilities. AstroDMX has support for INDI cameras since v2.0.2 although the author reports that there are issues with speed and for fastest capture the native drivers should be used, so perhaps the first thing might be to look at removing any bottlenecks to the data rate that might be caused by INDI. After that I guess ekos becomes just another capture application, so would need to look at implementing the same kinds of things as the other capture applications: high speed debayering and high speed preview rates, guiding based on the COG of the planet disc in view, auto ROI adjustment to help in coping with drift, setting of capture frame / time limits, tools like indication of RGB channel misalignment, etc. etc. One specific suggestion would be that the separation of all the camera settings into the INDI control panel is all very well for deep sky imaging where you don't change them often, but for planetary imaging it's much more convenient to have camera settings directly to hand so look at taking the best usability features from the existing front-runner planetary capture apps.

On the processing side, I write code for Siril; there is an ambition to improve our planetary processing capabilities in either the 1.3 development cycle or the one after that (it depends how we get on as there are also some other substantial feature additions as well as (if we're brave enough!) moving from gtk3 to gtk4... So hopefully there will be more native processing options in the not entirely distant future.