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Camera & Lens

Supported Hardware

Currently support is provided only for this combination of camera and lens:

Why This Camera and Lens

  • Off the shelf, affordable, and widely available
  • For use in urban light polluted skies:
    • Mono sensor provides substantially better sensitivity and contrast for star detection compared to a color sensor
    • F2.4 aperture provides good light gathering power required to detect faint stars in light polluted urban skies
    • 25mm focal length in combination with the OV9281's 1/4" sensor size provides a ~8° field of view which is a good balance between having enough stars for reliable plate-solving and speed of solving
    • In my bortle 8 city sky with a visual limiting magnitude of around 2.5, this camera/lens combo can reliably detect and plate-solve on stars down to about magnitude 6.5
  • Standard USB (UVC) interface allows for cross-platform compatibility without needing custom drivers
  • Calculated image scale and field of view (Astrometry results):
    • Size: 8.86° x 4.98°
    • Radius: 5.081°
    • Pixel scale: 24.9 arcsec/pixel

Currently only this specific camera and lens combination is supported. Support for additional cameras and lenses may be added in the future based on demand and usability. I decided to keep it this way for now to ensure a consistent and reliable user experience. Also this combination is very affordable and widely available, so it should be accessible for most users.

Sample Frame

Sample Frame

  • Bortle 8.5 city sky (Chennai, India)
  • Visual limiting magnitude of around 2.3 mag approx
  • M45 (Pleiades) invisible through naked eye. Haze, light pollution Dome
  • M45 clearly visible in frame from camera
  • Camera + F2.4 lens captures stars up to ~6.3 mag in city sky with haze and light pollution. This is sufficient for plate-solving with good confidence.
  • More that 40 stars detected to plate-solve with confidence
  • A 4 magnitudes improvement in limiting magnitude increases the number of stars visible by a factor of 40 approximately.

Adding Support for More Cameras

  • Adding the camera's VID/PID to the camera server's supported device list and implementing any necessary quirks for frame capture (if required)
  • Generating the tetra3 star database for the new camera/lens's field of view and plate scale.