Like many others, when I setup my first All Sky camera, I used Thomas Jacquin's fantastic allsky software.  It works very well, obviously.  My first camera was a ASI290MM, but I wanted to setup a color all sky camera and I wanted to see if I could use the Svbony SV305 [IMX290] camera which is at least half the cost of most planetary cameras in the same class.I think one of the biggest requests for enhancement for Thomas Jacquin's allsky is supporting more than just ZWO and Raspberry PI cameras.  For this reason, I decided to build my software around INDI.  This would have the possibility of supporting any camera supported by INDI.  The SV305 INDI support was about 6 months old at the time I started, but seemed to be reasonably stable.

8 months later, I think the INDI AllSky is stable enough to be released.



At this point, the camera and image management is roughly at parity with Thomas Jacquin's allsky.  A full web based interface is also included to support managing the camera and viewing the images.  The software is written in Python and utilizes the pyindi-client for the INDI interface.  Python may seem like a non-optimal choice, but most of the functionality is actually C-based modules (pyindi-client, OpenCV, pycurl, ffmpeg) so most operations are lightning fast.  The code is also implemented using Python multiprocessor semantics, so actions are implemented in parallel--operations like file uploads will not interfere with image acquisition.



I have been running both of my all sky cameras with my software for the past few months and INDI seems to be well up to the task for weeks of constant runtime.
Features:

  • Theoretically supports any INDI camera.  The software will automatically detect the camera on startup.
    • ZWO cameras have been extensively tested.
    • Svbony SV305
    • QHY
    • Altair
    • Touptek
    • Player One Astronomy
    • Raspberry Pi HQ Camera
    • Canon DSLRs supported
  • Automatic image debayering
  • Time lapse movie generation
  • Dark frames to remove hot pixels
  • Keograms
  • Star Trails
  • Day and night time support
    • Special "moon mode" operation reduces gain when the moon is out.
  • File upload support
  • Remote INDI server operation - operate camera remotely over the network
  • Pseudo-Sky Quality Meter - Use your all sky camera to measure sky brightness/quality

At this point I am really just waiting on more people to try the software with more cameras.  If you have any questions, you open a issue in the GitHub repo.