Lucky Imaging with NINA

[袁冬]

Hi Stefan and all,

I am an amateur in Beijing and also a developer in a Cloud Compute company :).

I used SGP as the platform for my remote telescope in the last year and have tried NINA for sometimes. This year, I buy a GSO RC12 and ASI6200MM Pro and want to try some small target.

As my observation station is in Beijing where the seeing is not good enough for such long focal length, so I want to use Lucky Imaging.

After some basic test, I found SGP is not suitable since the slow capture speed (about ~10s for one frame). While the state‐of‐the‐art COMS such as ASI6200MM Pro has 2FPS. I ask WenJia, the BOSS of ZWO, who said SGP is not optimized for ASI while the native driver has not be updated for a long time.

I test NINA, and the result is AMAZING!. It can reach about 0.5FPS (2s for one frame)! In consideration of each frame has 125MB+, the result is so COOL.

On the other hand, NINA is open source. I love open source (who doesn't? :p) , I worked on open source for about half year some years ago. My github address is https://github.com/yuandong1222.

So I decide to try to use NINA as the platform for Lucky Imaging which my new RC12 and ASI6200MM.

Although NINA is already very powerful, I am still not very sure whether it can provide a good workflow for Lucky Imaging.

I think there are some works I can do:

1. Even Fast Caputre
   Maybe 2FPS for ASI6200MM Pro. With ROI, I hope it can be 10FPS+.
2. Basic Select
   Lucky Imaging costs huge disk space. For 2FPS with ASI6200MM, the whole night needs 5TB+ space. so Basic Select based on HFR/FWHM/SNR/Backgroud/Others can redcue the space press.
3. Flexible End Condition
   Not only based on frame count, maybe also based on total SNR etc.

I will try to add these feature in the following period of time.

I have already setup the dev env, and tried to add a small improvement (see the attachment), I will test and commit it later.

Thanks so much, Looking forward to your reply, any comments are welcome.

Hope NINA will be better and beter!

Dong Yuan
[e-mail]

[Stefan B]

Hi 袁冬,

for better coordination I recommend joining our discord server. The sequencer is currently reworked and once done it is much more extensible.

[袁冬]

@Stefan B That sounds great, I will suspend my work now. Maybe I can do some tests on my new device before geting down to work.

[Stefan B]

The adv. sequencer has the ability for plugins. As this is not the main usage of the application, a plugin to do what you want to achieve here would be the best place. How to develop plugins is described here: https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina.plugin.template/src/master/