The SVBONY SV305 and the Raspberry Pi working well together.

A Skywatcher Explorer 130 PDS 130mm, f/5 Newtonian was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount.

An SVBONY SV305 production camera was placed at the Newtonian focus.

AstroDMx Capture for the Raspberry Pi was run on a Raspberry Pi 4B with the 32 bit Raspberry Pi OS. This system was used to capture 40 x 30s exposures of the globular cluster M15 as 16 bit Tiff files with matching dark-frames.

The best 36 frames were aligned and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. The resulting image was post processed in the Gimp 2.10, Affinity photo, and Neat image.

Click on an image to get a closer view.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for the Raspberry Pi capturing data on M15

The display transforms and the non-destructive display controls allow the 16 bit image preview to be nicely visualised.

Final image of M15

The system worked very well with the 32 bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Rasbian). Previous problems were due to us using a pre-production prototype that had different firmware. The camera always worked with te 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Ubuntu MATE for the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi 4B (also the 3B) in combination with the SVBONY SV305 camera makes a good imaging platform for long or short exposures. The SV305 is a very good, low cost astronomical imaging camera that now has its range extended across Windows, Linux and Linux for the Raspberry Pi ARM architecture. The same is true of the SV305 Pro.

AstroDMx Capture for Windows, macOS or Linux (Including Raspberry Pi) can be downloaded freely here:

https://www.astrodmx-capture.org.uk