ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the imaging equipment simplified some aspects. What follows is a high-level guide to installing, calibrating and using astronomy software for image capture. The venerable General Star Catalog is used by PinPoint for plate solving and also by planetariums for displaying stars. These often require the same astrometry data but in different compression formats. Communications can take several forms, including serial, USB and Ethernet. Sometimes those forms are a hybrid – for instance the SkyFi unit converts WiFi into a serial hardware interface and the computer issues serial commands through a WiFi link. Video Capture is very satisfying to take short duration videos of what appears to be a hazy object and process them into surprisingly clear objects. The humble webcam produces a simple compressed video stream; the more advanced models have the ability to output RAW video data and at a shorter exposures and higher frame rates too.
