Revision as of 03:10, 21 August 2012 by Vincent (talk | contribs) (summary of features and compilation issue with gcc-4.7)

GoQat

Link to official website.

Features

GoQat is best known for the support of QSI cameras, but it embeds a lot of other features and supports lots of devices:

  • Autoguiding using QSI cameras, V4L compatible cameras (like USB webcams), unicap compatible cameras, and composite camera using the video-to-firewire grabber from The Imaging Source.
  • Autofocus
  • Video capture, playback and analysis
  • Script engine
  • FITS image analysis using DS9


Full list of features from their website:

  • Set the CCD temperature and filter for your CCD exposures, capture sub-frames and use binning.
  • Display real-time scrolling graphs of your CCD camera cooler power and temperature.
  • Calibrate the autoguider with the camera at any angle with a single mouse-click.
  • Autoguide your exposures using the fully integrated autoguiding functions: CCD exposures automatically wait until the autoguider is ready.
  • Show real-time scrolling strip charts of star positions for periodic error analysis.
  • Focus your telescope automatically, including 'V-curve' calibration for point sources (stars), temperature compensated focusing and the ability to adjust focus according to defined offsets for each filter change.
  • Record real-time or time-lapse video from any of the supported video cameras.
  • Play back recorded video and automatically perform photometry and astrometry on each frame - ideal for asteroid occultations and other transient events.
  • Use task lists to control the operation of your telescope, CCD camera, autoguider and focuser completely unattended.
  • Execute arbitrary scripts in the language of your choice, to perform any external operations that you can do with a script (e.g. live upload of images to a website) and to interact with and control GoQat.
  • Load and save Losmandy Gemini pointing model parameters and PEC data, and more.

The website has its own hardware compatibility list.

Compilation

The QSIAPI (stable or beta), provided by QSI as opensource, does not compile with GCC-4.7 in current version (6.0.3 stable or 6.3.0 beta), but only with GCC-4.6. This is due to the fact that GCC-4.7 is not widely used yet, and QSI develops on Fedora 16 which ships GCC-4.6.3. When Fedora updates GCC, QSI will probably fix this issue too, as they have been notified about it.

For Arch Linux users, a GoQat package has been made on AUR.

Most dependencies are optional. If you have them at compilation-time, you will be able to use more devices (for example firewire or unicap cameras).