Well, I’ve done as much testing as I can face, if not as much as I’d like to have done. Managing 50-ish virtual machines and a couple of desktops booting into five different OS releases has got the better of me though and I just want this one out of the door now.

The major addition for this release is the majority of the support for the QHY5L-II. I only have the mono version of the camera, so I can’t be certain that colour works.

In addition there’s a new camera controls dialog and the “private” controls for the SPC900 are implemented. The major changes are listed here.

There are now two versions of each of the 32-bit and 64-bit binary releases to handle differences in libraries in the base distributions. Distributions based on Ubuntu 12.04 such as Mint 13 and DistroAstro have their own binaries. Unfortunately it appears for the time being that these releases may not support the SPC900 properly.

The major task for the next release is to port the entire application to OSX and get it working on a MacBook Pro. The current sources build though they don’t work correctly. I’m hopeful that it should be possible to get the QHY5, QHY5L-II and ASI cameras all working on OSX however. I’m also hoping to make a start on support for filter wheels.

A fair few changes this time around, the major one probably being the complete reorganisation of the camera library API to make it far tidier, though there’s still work to do there.

Other changes relate to handling different colour modes, adding TIFF support, support of a much larger number of camera controls (and allowing selection of the ones displayed in the UI), ROI support and much improved support for the QHY5.  The major changes are listed here.

Work on the next release has already begun…

I’ve pretty much completed everything I wanted to do for this next release.  Now I just have some testing left, updating the documentation and building the source and binary distributions.  Once those jobs are done I shall be making a new release.

It’s taken some time, but 0.0.3 beta is now out.  See the downloads section for source and binaries.

If you’re building the source, please read the files in the docs directory first otherwise you’re likely to get nowhere fast.

I have used this application for capturing images of Jupiter, but opportunities for “real life” testing have been few and far between this winter.

It should work with the SPC900 and many, if not all, of the ZWO ASI camera models though I’ve only tested against the ASI120MM and ASI120MC. Likewise the Imaging Source CCD cameras should all work, but I have only tested with some of the DxK21 models. The QHY5 seems to work for me but the documentation is limited and I wouldn’t like to guarantee it. Certainly it is very unreliable on the Raspberry Pi. The Xbox and Lifecam cameras will work, but require a bit of kernel-hackery.

As well as many bugfixes this release includes support for raw colour, demosaicking, capture limits by frame, SER file format output (v2), different reticle designs, improvements in the settings window management and improvements in handling of 16-bit and binned mono.

Downloads of the second alpha release of oaCapture are now available from the downloads page.