A ZWO ASI Camera Capture App

stephan adminon
ASI178MM AllSky

ASI cameras with mono and color sensors like the ZWO ASI series for infrared-, planetary-, and astro-photography.

ZWO ASI cameras (supporting both mono and color sensors) are high-performance USB3 cameras featuring high-resolution sensors and 14-bit ADCs — excellent tools for planetary, infrared, night-sky, and high-speed capture. The desktop app was written in C++ / Qt 6 to drive these cameras across platforms. The project is available in both a Linux Version and a Windows Version.

Three modes, one live preview

The application window shows the live preview on the left and all controls in a touch-friendly side panel on the right:

  • Photo — single-frame stills. The exposure spans 32 µs to 60 s on a logarithmic slider with a range switch. Shots are saved as 8bit PNG or 16bit TIFF.
  • Interval — back-to-back long-exposure sequences. The next shot starts interval seconds after the previous one finished.
  • Video — 8bit H.264 MP4 or uncompressed 8/16bit .ser files that keep the sensor’s full bit depth.

The preview refreshes at roughly 30 fps in every mode and is accompanied by a 128-bin histogram. When pixels saturate, the histogram shows a ⚠ CLIPPED x.xx% warning and the clipped pixels are marked red directly in the preview.

What it is good for

  • Infrared and planetary photography — using mono sensors with infrared filters or capturing detailed color imagery with RGB sensors.
  • All sky camera — a fisheye lens plus interval mode produces timelapse material for the Milky Way, aurora, and cloud cover, with every frame saved at 8bit or 16bit.
  • Astro photography — exposures up to 60s and fixed-interval sequences of 16bit TIFF stills provide stackable data for deep-sky imaging.
  • High speed video — up to ~400 fps at smaller image sizes and 8-bit .ser format.

Under the hood

C++17, Qt 6 Widgets, OpenCV, and GStreamer. Capture runs on a dedicated worker thread, while a separate thread renders the preview and histogram at 30 Hz. H.264 encoding uses a GStreamer pipeline, and .ser writing is handled via a dedicated writer for the LUCAM-RECORDER v3 format.

Source code, build instructions, and detailed documentation can be found in the repositories: