Astroscan is a simple interactive interface for controlling digital cameras for doing astronomical imaging, but not only!

You can use it for timelapse, stop-motion, anything that requires you to automatically remote control a digital camera. Its simple interface is designed to work through any weak internet connexion. For instance, Astroscan can be run onto a Raspberry Pi on which your camera and harddrive are plugged, and you can control everything remotely through a wifi connexion.

Please ensure that you have a working installation of gphoto2 as well as python-gphoto2. Astroscan also relies on curses-menu and curtsies.

Astroscan should be started within a xterm. It is assumed that a digital camera is plugged in (via USB), on, and astroscan will first attempt to initialize it. If no camera is connected, astroscan will proceed with a warning message and would only allow to explore the menus (pretty useless then!).

Default settings should be edited in the config file config.ini, such as the default storage path for captures, flat and bias images, the delay between two successive shots, the number of HDR frames and exposure range in between, etc...

#storage path for captures
toppath ='/tmp/tests/'
imgpath = toppath + 'raws/'
flatpath = toppath + 'flats/'
zeropath = toppath + 'zeros/'

#img settings
imgroot = 'test'
imgtype = 'nef'

#hdr default settings
hdrframe = 1
exprange = 2

The main menu looks like this:

The first entry is the main control interface where you can start, and stop, taking acquisitions (the "position" command is currently unused but will allow, at some point, to control the mount):

The second entry goes into another menu allowing you to set various other parameters:

The next entry goes into the "calibration" menu, where you can start taking flat or bias exposures:

Have fun!