Thursday, 20 February 2020

M42 with an SV305, a 102mm, f/4.5, ED refractor and AstroDMx Capture for Linux running in a Lubuntu VirtualBox on a Win10 laptop

An SVBONY SV305 camera was placed at the prime focus of a 102mm, f/4.5, ED refractor. AstroDMx Capture for Linux was running in an Oracle VM Virtual Box Lubuntu Linux virtual machine, running on a ThinkPaad X230, Windows 10 host computer.
The scope was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount. The mount, motor-focuser and the camera were all controlled from indoors using extension cables (active USB cable for the camera).
50 x 10s exposures of the Orion nebula were captured with matching dark-frames.
AstroDMx Capture for Linux saved the 16 bit Tiff files to a shared folder that was accesible by the Windows 10 host computer.

AstroDMx Capture for Linux streaming the image data 

The Lubuntu panel can be seen at the left of the image and the Windows taskbar can be seen at the bottom of the image.
AstroDMx Capture for Linux capturing the data

On the Windows machine, the images were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and post processed in The Gimp 2.10 and FastStone.

The Orion Nebula captured in the Virtual Linux machine

This experiment demonstrates that it is possible to run AstroDMx Capture for Linux on a Windows10 computer inside an Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual Lubuntu machine. It also works with macOS!