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Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

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Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#41

Post by andruby »

fludlight wrote: post #20
jws wrote: post #16

Having done this… - don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it. - the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night…

> Maybe have something in there that is colder Such as?

there are astro specific cameras with a cooler. Peltier + heatsink.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#42

Post by mathgaron »

porphyra wrote: post #7

How do you prevent the sun from damaging the sensor over time?

I helped build a similar setup a "long" time ago to build a sky HDR database. We had over 40k images across hundreds of days. The longer exposures definitely did not help (even with a ND filter) and by the end the camera had some broken pixels along the sun trail. Nothing noticeable visually, but likely not good for computer vision purpose. If we were to redo this it would be definitely a valid concern to address.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#44

Post by destitude »

malfist wrote: post #2

I've been in the process of planning a backyard observatory some and have been looking at all sky cameras to measure clouds, seeing and sky glow. This project looks really promising, especially if it has an ascom driver

https://github.com/aaronwmorris/indi-allsky has INDI drivers.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#45

Post by destitude »

porphyra wrote: post #7

How do you prevent the sun from damaging the sensor over time?

Mine has been going on 4 years now with zero issues with the camera (ZWO 178MC). The acrylic domes however are a hot mess. Frequently have to replace them. Really need to find high quality glass domes preferably with anti-reflective coating.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#46

Post by destitude »

jws wrote: post #16

Having done this… - don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it. - the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night…

I've had zero issues with ZWO cameras that have a manual focus lens attached to it and have had air temps from 95F to -45F.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#47

Post by tecleandor »

jws wrote: post #16

Having done this… - don’t make your camera the highest thing around. My dome was showing scratches. Eventually I got a nice photo of the inside of a juvenile bald eagle’s talon. A bird’s gonna perch where a bird’s gonna perch. Sacrifice some sky and put a better perch next to it. - the manual focus cameras seem to be temperature dependent. Maybe get something that can be auto focused or add a heater to control night…

Regardiing condensation, if you can make the case kind of air tight, maybe you can either fill it with nitrogen, make a light vacuum, or pre-dry the air inside (I remember some tricks to avoid condensation in underwater cameras that consisted in storing it open in the fridge for some hours or something like that, to have drier air inside, I'll look for that again...)

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#48

Post by bloopernova »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #19

The Pi cameras might seem like a good choice because they're cheap, and might be a good way to start. But with all of the work required to build, install, and maintain one, the cost of the camera is a drop in the bucket. I used a much better camera from ZWO (ASI462MC) for about $300 (I actually ended up building a second one with the ASI462MM (monochrome)). It even comes with an all sky lens. IMHO it doesn't make a l…

I'm definitely late to this thread, but I wanted to ask: do you know how much of the world is covered by sky cameras? I was just envisioning a google maps kind of interface where you could grab shots from people who share their images.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#49

Post by justin66 »

dheera wrote: post #32

I really wish RPi would come out with a truly HQ camera. Their "HQ" camera is really a LOW quality camera with a shitty sensor that isn't even micro-four-thirds. The lens choices are abysmal. I want to see at LEAST APS-C or better yet full frame. Considering a full-blown mirrorless full frame camera costs $2400 it shouldn't cost more than $1000 for sensor only, and I'm 1000% willing to pay for a hackable, programmabl…

Have the Raspberry Pi people done anything even similar to the release of a $1000 part? It doesn't really seem up their alley.

Re: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera

#50

Post by adolph »

My next thought was that if I had a bearing on that luminous streak, and if at least one other person in my region also had such information, we might be able to triangulate on it and narrow down where any landing zone might be.

It seems like deploying these in pairs at a minimum would make sense. In addition to adding spatial information, it gives you a backup for any observations at all.

The illustrations are great. Reminded me of how the storage disk from the starhinge in Stephenson's Anathem must have looked.

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