How to use a Raspberry Pi to capture images of planets #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi #astrophotogtaphy

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Blogger Jason Bowling shares his astrophotography project that uses a telescope and a Raspberry Pi (H/T Hackaday)

I recently bought a Celestron 127SLT telescope with the goal of doing some solar system observation and photography. I had a Raspberry Pi camera and a B+ board kicking around from a previous robotics project, and decided to give it a try. It’s not an ideal camera for this sort of thing, not by a long shot – but I already had it. The v1 camera can now be had for $13. It was worth a try.

The results were better than I expected.

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A friend printed this mount for me. It was easy to assemble and everything fits well. This allows you to plug the camera in like an eyepiece. If you just replace the eyepiece with your camera, you are doing prime focus photography, which uses the telescope as a giant camera lens and focuses the image directly on your camera’s sensor.

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See the full post and learn how it was made


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