gccd

A ccd camera control program

Version : 0.2
Author(s) : Dave Schmenk (dschmenk@earthlink.net)
License : GPL
Website : http://home.earthlink.net/~dschmenk

Disk space required for installation is 2.11 Mb

A shortcut will be installed in the KDE/GNOME desktop menu system,
as an entry in the Astronomy submenu

Summary

GCCD is a CCD camera control and imaging application. It is specifically
designed to get the best images from your camera setup. As such, support
for telescope tracking, filter wheels, automatic guiding (including
self-guiding for SX MX cameras), and someday focusers. One shot color
cameras are fully supported, including the ability to 'track-n-stack'
images. They will be split apart to each color channel before being
registered. GCCD is not a celestial charting program. For a great
program that supports just about everything, look to XEphem. GCCD is not
am image processing program. Use GIMP for that. GCCD is meant to make
acquiring images as simple and automatic as possible.

Supported Cameras
-----------------

GCCD uses any camera that is supported by the CCD camera kernel driver.
The kernel drivers currently supported include the Connectix parallel port
Quickcams and the Starlight Xpress MX5 series. Anyone wanting to add
camera support to GCCD must do it through the kernel driver architecture.

Supported Accesories
--------------------

Currently GCCD can control the telescope through the LX200 serial port
interface or the Starlight Xpress STAR2000 adapter. The interface is used
for guiding and slewing the scope. No 'GOTO' capability exists. For
filter work, the TrueTech Custom Filter Wheel is supported. A filter
sequence can be set up to automatically set the filter and expose a
percentage of the requested expose time (1% to 1000%). In order to access
the serial ports from GCCD, make sure the device files /dev/ttyS* are
read/writeable to your account.

Features, Bugs, Etc.
--------------------

This is a very preliminary release. The feature set seemed complete
enough to finally be useful. Save often. I know it will crash just when
you have taken the image of a new comet that will get your name. There
are still many missing features. Noteably the ability to select which
object to guide on. Currently it is automatically selected. Also,
traing the tracking rate isn't implemented. You may have to experiment
with this. You can figure this out for yourself by moving the scope in
each direction during an integration. If you do it for 1 second, count
how far the star trails are in pixels for each direction. That is the
number to put into the tracking rate. The FITS header is still missing
lots of information, and no way to edit it. The View settings don't
always want to follow the images properly. Thats my ignorance on how
Gnome/GTK works. Files are not automatically saved. If you exit without
saving, bye-bye image. Hopefully all this will be fixed over time. Now
is time to play with it for awhile so you can give me...

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