A Skywatcher Star Discovery 150mm, f/5 Newtonian was mounted on a Star Discovery AZ GOTO mount and an SVBONY SV305M Pro was placed at the Newtonian focus.
The Star Discovery scope and mount used
A Lenovo Chromebook S345 with 4GB RAM and a 64GB eMMC drive and an AMD A6 CPU was used for capturing lunar data. The Chromebook was running Crostini with Linux and had installed all of the software needed to capture and process the data.
AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS was used for capturing. It should be noted that at the time of writing, the only cameras that will work are the SVBONY SV305 series of cameras. At this stage we don’t know whether it will become possible to use other makes of camera in Chrome OS like this, or indeed, whether future updates of Chrome OS might break its present capabilities.
The software installed in the Crostini Linux container includes:
- AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS (native Linux)
- Wine, Windows compatibility layer (native Linux)
- Autostakkert! 2 for stacking (using Wine)
- IRIS for wavelet processing (using Wine)
- The Gimp 2.10 for post-processing (native Linux)
- Hugin Panorama Creator for stitching image panes together (native Linux)
AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS was used to capture 1000-frame SER files of three, overlapping regions of the Moon covering the terminator side of the 98.5% waxing Moon, but not the whole lunar disk.
Click on an image to get a closer view
AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS capturing a SER file of the Plato/Sinus Iridum region of the Moon.
Final image of the Plato/Sinus Iridum region
AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS capturing a SER file of the Copernicus/Kepler region of the Moon.
Final image of the Copernicus/Kepler region
AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS capturing a SER file of the Tycho region of the Moon.
Final image of the Tycho region
Hugin Panorama Creator was used to align and stitch the three panes of the terminator side of the Moon into a mosaic.
