The Saint Michel Astronomy Society wrote to us again last week, to update us on their ongoing tests with the DMK 41AU02.AS astronomy camera. In their latest report, David Laine, told us about his work on constructing a mosaic image of the Moon. His detailed post contains information on the techniques and hardware, which he used to capture and assemble the images.

First of all, below is an example of one of the images, which he captured with a DMK 41AU02.AS astronomy camera, 6.3 reducer and a Barlow:

And the resulting mosaic image (click for original):

Accompanying his images, David wrote:

Out in the field, the handling of the cameras is pretty easy: All you have to do is connect the USB 2.0 cable, and attach the cameras to the telescope’s eyepiece. I am by no means a specialist, when it comes to astro-imaging with a webcam, but I was able to save my first AVI in less than 5 minutes. I use the shipped software – IC Capture.AS – to change only the gain and exposure values. This was all I had to do to get a good image of the Moon.

If you can read French, take a look David’s article, which he posted in the society’s blog.

Thank you David for your contribution to The Imaging Source astronomy cameras community.

Arne Caspari has recently published a very detailed article about getting the most out of The Imaging Source industrial and astronomy cameras on Linux.

His preferred distribution is Ubuntu and thus his article is particularly relevant to this blog. We have often talked about deploying The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Ubuntu.

As he states in his post, Arne is the chief developer of the firmware, which runs on The Imaging Source cameras. He is employed at The Imaging Source here in Bremen, Germany:

The Imaging Source AU/BU cameras are a popular series of USB Video Class compliant cameras for industrial and [...] astronomy vision. If you are wondering about my preference for The Imaging Source cameras, the reason is simply that I am the lead developer of the camera firmware of these cameras.

Before you can use all the features of the USB cameras on Linux, you have to master some hurdles but the installation should be quite easy with the following instructions.

Arne goes on to list the steps which need to be taken. If you are interested in running The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Ubuntu, please read through his post – it contains a number of very tasty morsels.

Arne Caspari: Installing USB Cameras

The capture program for Linux is called ucview, which deploys the unicap library.

I am delighted to announce that unicap 0.2.22 has just been released.

It now ships with the following improvements:

• Better support for The Imaging Source USB 2.0 astronomy and industrial cameras
  (download the uvcvideo driver)
• Added and fixed some color conversion routines
• GTK+ apps can register their own color format conversion callback
• Some minor fixes in the unicapGTK library
• Support for recent uvcvideo drivers
• French translation (thanks to Kiki Novak!)
• Packages for Ubuntu Hardy

You can download the source code package from the unicap web site:
http://www.unicap-imaging.org/download.htm

Packages for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) are in the repositories:
http://www.unicap-imaging.org/using_repositories.htm

We have talked about using The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Linux previously (here, here and here).

The capture program for Linux is called ucview, which deploys the unicap library.

I am delighted to announce to better support the Linux astronomy cameras community, a set of unicap forums have been launched:

• http://www.unicap-imaging.org/forums/

If you have any matter related to running The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Linux with ucview and unicap, please do not hesitate to post your questions into the above forum.

The forum is maintained by the program’s chief developer, Arne Caspari.

Yesterday, I blogged about using The Imaging Source FireWire astronomy cameras on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). Today, I would like run through the same procedure, but with USB 2.0 astronomy cameras.

Step #1: Set up the hardware

Connect a USB 2.0 astronomy cameras to the USB 2.0 port on your computer with a simple USB cable. Please make sure that your PC does indeed have a USB 2.0 port and not the older USB 1.0. If you purchased your PC within the last four years, you will certainly have a USB 2.0 port. The Imaging Source USB 2.0 astronomy cameras do not support USB 1.0, simply because the cameras produce so much data that it is impossible to transfer it all over the slow USB 1.0 interface.

Step #2: Set up the USB 2.0 driver

This is the most complicated step of the whole procedure. We need to download and compile the USB 2.0 driver. First, however, you need to install a compiler and linux headers:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic

Now we have an environment in which the USB 2.0 driver can be compiled.

Delete the shipped USB 2.0 driver:

sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.20-15-generic/kernel/ubuntu/media/usbvideo/uvcvideo.ko

Change to your source code directory:

cd /usr/src/

And download the USB 2.0 driver source code:

sudo wget http://www.astronomycamerasblog.com/wp-content/
uploads-extra/linux-uvc_trunk_arne.tar.gz

Extract the files:

sudo tar xfzv linux-uvc_trunk_arne.tar.gz

And change directory into the source code tree:

cd linux-uvc_trunk_arne

Compile the code:

sudo make

Install the new USB 2.0 driver:

sudo make install

You now have the latest USB 2.0 driver installed on your PC.

Step #3: Set up the software

The software that is required to use The Imaging Source USB 2.0 astronomy cameras on Ubuntu 7.04 is available from a 3rd party project and released under a General Public License (GPL) and a commercial license.

The project is called unicap and has its own homepage at unicap-imaging.org. Maintained by Arne Caspari, the project is sponsored by The Imaging Source.

To access and install the software, you first need to update your sources.list. This can be done with:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

At the end of the file, add the following two lines:

# The Imaging Source Cameras
deb http://unicap-imaging.org/packages feisty main

Save and close the file.

Update the repository listing:

sudo apt-get update

And install the video capture application (ucview) with all its dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ucview

A detailed description of these steps can be found on the project’s web site.

Reboot.

Now, you can start ucview (the capture application) with:

ucview

You should see the following application window:

Please post requests for support in the comments section below.

References

• http://www.theimagingsource.com/en/products/cameras/
• http://www.unicap-imaging.org
• http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/

Image in screenshot is copyright Dierick Vercouter.