Hubble Pi Is a Raspberry Pi-Based Astrophotography Camera

Taking photos of celestial objects isn’t easy, and you can’t just point your smartphone at the night sky and take a snapshot. There are three reasons for that: lack of magnification, lack of shutter control, and lack of stability. Magnification is an obvious problem, because your smartphone likely doesn’t have any kind of optical zoom. Shutter control is important because you need a very long exposure time in order to pick up the relatively weak light coming from celestial bodies. A stable mount is necessary for those long exposure photos. But if you already have a telescope, you can use a Raspberry Pi to outfit it for astrophotography.

This project is highly dependent on the telescope you’re using and you’ll want a model with decent optics and ideally a mount that can compensate for the rotation of the Earth. Santiago Rodriguez, the creator of the Hubble Pi, is using a Sky-Watcher Skymax 90 telescope. That model costs about $190, plus the price of the mount (which can easily cost more than the telescope itself). The Hubble Pi setup will, however, work with any telescope that has a 1.25" eyepiece. That’s because you’re going to use a 1.25" male to C-mount adapter to attach the camera to the telescope.

That camera is Raspberry Pi’s official new HQ Camera Module, which has a nice 12 megapixel sensor. With the adapter, you’re basically turning the telescope into a huge lens for that camera. The camera module connects to a Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) SBC. Two important pieces of software are running on that: KStars to locate celestial objects and point the telescope at them, and AstroCam to control the camera settings. A 3.5” 320x480 touchscreen LCD is used to change those settings. A telescope phone mount is great for attaching the Raspberry Pi directly to your telescope. Follow the Hubble Pi documentation to configure the Raspberry Pi and software, and then you’ll be taking pictures of the moon and other planets in no time!