Have you ever wished you could take pictures at night with the sweet Raspberry Pi High Quality (HQ) Camera?

Using the raspistill command line program is tricky because the auto setting determination usually results in a black picture.

Now, though, with a little Python, you can take pictures up to six seconds long at ISO 800! That'll turn a dark night lit only by a few house lights into a bright, well-saturated picture!

This image was taken at one in the morning with a Pi4 and HQ Camera with 6mm lens.

There are a wide range of options you can use to implement this. I wanted a compact, portable system to do astrophotography, so I built the system specifically to do that. If you want, you can just use the code with an HQ Camera setup you already have. It's totally up to you how sophisticated you want to be. (For example, I don't go into motorized star tracker equatorial mounts even though I'm doing astrophotography.) The mounting solution is up to you, again, depending on your use cases!

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