Photographing Saturn on Linux!
January 28, 2008
We used my friend Dr. Suresh’s Philips ToUcam webcam with minor modifications to photograph Saturn through our institute’s 8″ Celestron GT Advanced telescope!
A bit of googling told me how to use a Webcam with Linux – there’s the Linux Webcam HOWTO that has more than you’ll ever need.
The kernel happened to be very nice and detected the webcam and provided a /dev/video0 device – so I didn’t have to break my head over that. A bit of software that was available on the Debian repositories called ‘camstream’ helped me view the webcam image and take snapshots at 1 fps (which is rather slow 
). The Webcam HOWTO also talked of this CLI program called ’streamer’ (this was on the Debian repos as well) which could capture from the webcam in AVI format!
My friend and me processed the photos using Registax v4 (No! this is not Open Source X-( ) on WINE and then with The GIMP. Registax is not open source and is rather limited in functionality – it can’t handle more than 500 still image files at a time, couldn’t read the AVI format we captured in, and most importantly doesn’t run natively on Linux. This has inspired us to think of writing a FOSS stacking software. I have no idea how we’ll do that because nobody knows anything about stacking here! If somebody is interested in helping out, please drop a comment or contact me on IRC etc etc.
Our photos are available here:
http://www.bas.org.in/Home/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1136
And as is expected of true open source fanatics, we release them to Public Domain. No rights reserved 
Entry Filed under: GNU/Linux/FOSS. Tags: Astrophotography, camstream, Linux, Philips ToUcam, streamer, Webcam.
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1.
Anirudh | February 18, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Your fps problem can be solved to an extent.Lookup this page http://opencvlibrary.sourceforge.net/CameraCapture .I got a fps of about 8 using this and a logitech webcam.
2.
Akarsh Simha | February 19, 2008 at 11:27 am
Thanks Anirudh. I’ll take a look at it.
Streamer can do 10 fps with the Philips ToUcam, but I don’t know how to adjust exposure etc with streamer, and I don’t think it can.
I’ll see if CameraCapture can do this.
3.
Kernowyon | April 24, 2008 at 1:38 am
Hi,
wxcam, which was designed partly with astrophotography in mind I believe, gives 10 fps @ 640×480. Tested using a Celestron Neximage cam – which is basically the ToUcam in a new body.
I have messed around with some older CMOS based cams but they don’t have the sensitivity at night. But they did let me check that wxcam would give a reasonable framerate. I got similar framerates from a Logitech cam, but with lower resolution.
If you are using one of the Ubuntu based systems, then there is a .deb which installs easily.
4.
Akarsh Simha | April 27, 2008 at 2:11 am
Thanks for the info Kernowyon. I’ll try it next time I get a webcam in hand.
5.
Mercurio | June 18, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hi,
I was looking for a FOSS software for staking images too.
Maybe Hugin can do it, even if its purpose is different
http://wiki.panotools.org/Align_image_stack
6.
Akarsh Simha | June 22, 2008 at 11:20 am
I took a brief look at the Hugin Wiki. It sounds pretty attractive, for photography in general and astrophotography as well. (Imagine putting together a Milky Way panorama or something
some day). Thanks a lot for pointing me there. I’ll take some time out this week and get Hugin installed.