Andrea Ricciardi

Hi roryt, sorry for the delay, but the notification email went to spam, don't know why... I'm very happy to see somebody sharing our love for open source: I think that a lot of work has been done to fill the gap between Windows and Linux regarding sw support: did you have a look to Ekos? It looks like a very good single program for AP sessions: I do have in mind to try to port it to our platform. I think INDI is going to grow a lot: just this morning I've been contacted by one of the INDI developers asking if we have an SDK to develop an INDI driver for the AST8300. There's a growing community behind INDI (note: community, not vendors...) willing to enlarge the compatible devices. So, to answer your question: some devices lacks support on the AST8300, but our mission is to work on enlarging this support to all relevant equipment, and we're confident that the open source community will do the rest. As for the guider, I used lin_guider for a while with no problems: it is fast and accurate, with most common autoguiders supported. It supports dithering as well. I made a port of it to run on our camera (basically just a resize of the main windows of the GUI), and it looks very stable. As for your DSI I PRO, it is not supported under lin_guider (last release includes DSI2PRO) so, as you are an expert, it's time you contribute a driver for it! Jokes apart, I'm interested in understanding what you mean, step by step, with a "good AP session": at the moment, with my mount and guider, using only the camera, without a PC, I'm able to: - use an app for starting and monitoring cooling regulation - use the focus app to display a star on an highly magnified subframe at 3 fps with FWHM calculation and profile graph (soon to come autofocus support) - point an object from NGC, IC or MESSIER catalog using an app interfacing to the mount goto - frame the object with an extremely sensitive 10x5 binning liveview app - locate, calibrate and track a guide star in the autoguider camera using lin_guider - use the take photos app to schedule a serie of exposures for up to all the 7 available filters (like: first 10x600sec bin 1x1 in luminance, then 10x300sec bin2x2 in red ...), optionally with dithering - review the photos in the fits viewer app. I will post some videos soon on our Facebook page. I think most necessary steps are already available and probably the missing ones are on our schedule Bottomline: of course we're not willing to convince anyone to change methodology. Anyone can use the AST8300 with a Windows pc using the (almost ready) ASCOM driver: standalone capability is only one of the main points of our camera, but there's more to it, as you can see from the specifications. Andrea

Hi everybody, I'm Andrea Ricciardi from Astrel Instruments, I will be happy to answer any question regarding the AST8300 CCD camera. Unfortunately I can't speak Greek and google translator is not that good @roryt: 1) driver with the relevant control sensitive comparator camera driving Sorry, I can't understand, google translator was way off here 2) possibility for dithering For autoguiding, we developed a version of the Lin_guider open source software (http://sourceforge.net/projects/linguider) running on the camera PC: you can connect a commercial guider directly to one of the camera's USB ports. The application supports dithering through communication with the camera exposure planner app 3) possibility for autofocus (focusmax etc.) The camera runs an INDI server, which is the Linux equivalent of ASCOM. Many devices can be controlled using INDI (http://indilib.org/devices.html), we're currently developing the GUI for autofocus, it will be ready in a month. 4) possibility for plate solving We run on camera the Charon open source astrometry application: we use it in the camera sw we developed for the ESO LPC project, an instrument using our AST8300 that will be mounted on the VLT in May. Given a good approximation of the center field coordinates, it performs plate solving in less than 20 seconds. We plan to use it for developing an app performing automatic n-stars mount alignment. The camera has already an app onboard that interfaces with the mount to perform goto find of objects. Anyway, if framing is your issue, I think you will appreciate the 10x5 binning liveview, which shows faint nebulas on the display in a matter of seconds...much more funny than a planetarium sw! 5) to know that the 8G will endure my frame, and will not fill If not, just put a pendrive or an external HD on the USB port 6) availability of software (unless liked scratching) Software is available and completely open source: you're free to add new functionality to the camera 7) Ability to choose hardware not with locks in a vendor Here again, I can't understand the translator... @astrovox: You're perfectly ok using your smartphone or tablet: all you need is a VNC client application, we tested several under Android, Windows phone and Apple. Note that these applications only provides a wifi remote desktop connection with the camera: all the software always run on the camera, the smartphone/tablet is only a terminal showing the camera desktop/applications. The touch display is there because it doesn't get out of charge like your phone could do after many hours in the cold. When operated with the included stylus, the touch is very light and I operated it while autoguiding without disturbing the tracking, The camera runs Linux. All the sw needed to operate the camera is developed and guaranteed by us: your camera is ready to use out of the box with all the functionality described. Moreover, people willing to customize or develop new applications are free and encouraged to do it! I would like to add that we're about to release also an wifi ASCOM driver for the camera, so it could be used like a "normal" PC-slave camera with all the convenience of wifi connection. For any doubt, don't hesitate to ask (but not in Greek, please Andrea