I've been trying to get the Pi HQ to work as a guide camera for a few weeks now but have not succeeded yet.

Here is my story:

I have a C-mount to 1.25 inch adapter and then use the HQ camera in a Svbony 50mm guidescope (190mm focal length).

With either raspistill or RPi_Cam_Web_Interface, I'm able to get a star field. It is faint with never more than a few starts visible yet astrometry.net is able to resolve the images so it is adequat. See for example: nova.astrometry.net/user_images/3821744#annotated

With my 50mm Svbony guidescope and its focal length of 190mm, the field of view is as follows according to astrometry.net image:
Size: 1.91 x 1.43 deg
Pixel scale: 1.7 arcsec/pixel

My main scope is a 650mm focal length with a Nikon APS-C crop sensors that gives me 2.0 deg wide field of view. The guidecope would thus have a near 1:1 field of view and nearly matching arcsec/pixel.

Here are my 2 issues: First, I'm trying to get it to work with PHD2 via the indi_v4l2_ccd driver running on the pi. I'm on version 1.8.4 and I'm not able to get good images at night. During the day, I can see in PHD2 daylight images of what ever the guide camera is pointing too. At night however, I get a lot of noise (white dots all over that change position on every shot) and can't get stars. I obviously have an exposure, white balancing or gain issue.

Second problem is that indi_v4l2_ccd (or V4L2 by itself) does not support the camera's high resolution out-of-the-box. Someone has identified that if you manually set the camera resolution before starting indi, then it works but at that resolution, PH2 complains and I get no images (daylight or night). BTW: I use the following cmd:
v4l2-ctl -v width=4056,height=3040,pixelformat=BGR3

If anyone has figured this out yet, let us know. I'm going to upgrade to indilib 1.8.5 and continue hunting from there. I'l also try to see if I can get exposure/gain to work at when imaging using commandline v4l2 tools instead of indilib.

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