AstraLite

AstraLite is software for deepsky astrophotography and live stacking on low power PCs (like rapsberry Pi or Orange Pi)

! The program is under active development !

AstraLite uses INDI server to work with astrophotography hardware. See https://www.indilib.org/download.html to install INDI

Compiled binaries and discussion here: https://www.indilib.org/forum/clients/13006-astralite-simple-indi-client-for-astrophotography.html

Features

• Saving RAW frames
• Live stacking with satellites and meteors track removal
• Darks, biases and defective pixels library
• Light frames quality filter
• Simple guiding and dithering by main camera
• Autofocus
• Sky map
• Plate solving
• Manual mount control
• PHD2 support for dithering
• UI for INDI devices control

Future plans

• Mount polar alignment
• INDI driver crash recovery
• Live view from camera in video mode
• Meridian flip support

How to build AstraLite

Prerequisites for Linux

• Rust compiler: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
• Libs and tools:

sudo apt install gcc libgtk-3-dev build-essential

Prerequisites for MS Windows

• Rust compiler (i686-pc-windows-gnu): https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install Note! You have to install *-gnu (not *-msvc) toolchain:

rustup-init.exe --default-toolchain=stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu --default-host=x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

• MSYS: https://www.msys2.org/
• Libs and tools (type inside MSYS command line):

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

Don't forget to set your PATH environment variable to point to the mingw64\bin directory of MSYS

How to build for you platform

To build optimized binaries for your current platform, just type

cargo build --release

Building and creating deb-packages for arm64, armhf and x64_86 platforms

Prerequisites

• Install podman or docker (I prefer podman):

sudo apt install podman

• Install cross https://github.com/cross-rs/cross :

cargo install cross --git https://github.com/cross-rs/cross

How to build

Execute build_cross.sh. Once build_cross.sh has finished running, you will find the deb packages in the dist folder.

Data sources

DSO:

• Messier, NGC and IC catalogue from OpenNGC - https://github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC
• Caldwell catalogue - http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky/caldwell.html
• DSO nicknames list - https://www.astrobin.com/fg7b5l/

Stars:

• Tycho-2 catalogue - https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/hipparcos/tycho-2
• HYG v3 catalogue - https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database/tree/main/hyg/v3