
How to make a simple all-sky camera - jacquesm
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/how-to-make-a-simple-all-sky-camera/
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jws
I made one a couple years ago to watch the clouds sail cross the sky. After a
few weeks I noticed scratches in my acrylic dome. On review I have some nice
picture of the feet and claws of juvenile bald eagle.

Sacrifice a bit of your horizon to make a perch higher than your dome.

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jacquesm
Oh that's almost as cool as seeing a meteor. Not sure which are rarer even. No
bald eagles here so I should be safe but it's a good point that you may want
to investigate the local wildlife before staring on a project like this.

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secstate
Bald eagles are everywhere in Maine now. Near a tidal estuary near us we
counted 25 sitting in trees watching the smelt run.

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205guy
For a while, I wanted to make one of these for day-time use, to measure cloud
cover and maybe get daily/weekly averages. Then I realized that solar panels
make a great photo-diode for measuring light intensity. You just need a bit of
math to account for ephemerides (sunrise/sunset in particular) and angle of
exposure.

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nyx_
You can get surprisingly good results with throwaway hardware. A few years ago
I did an all-night time lapse of a night-blooming cereus opening up its once-
yearly flower. $10 throwaway 480p webcam on a cheap tripod, old laptop running
a script to capture every few minutes, old incandescent lamp to keep the thing
lit through the night. Fed all the images into ffmpeg (with some noise
reduction, I think?) and found the output looked almost professional, apart
from the low resolution.

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mszcz
I've recently used na RPi4 with a ArduCam OV5647 camera and a LS-40180 Fish
Eye CS mount to make a home security cam as a fun project. Works nice and has
a 194 horizontal / 142 vertical FOV.

I wonder if that setup would work for something like this? Does anybody have
experience using cheap RPi-like equipment for things like these? Am I correct
in assuming that this wouldn't work because of the low sensitivity of the
sensor in the cam (I know next to nothing about photography)?

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madaxe_again
Your camera is your limiting factor here - at 5MP, and ¼”, you have some
pretty small pixels. The dark current etc. is unspecified in the spec sheet.
The lens is small. Together, that means low photons per pixel, and noise
becomes dominant.

You would probably be able to image _something_ , but you’d want a bigger
sensor and lens ideally.

That said, you can still do plenty if you’re willing to set the thing up on an
electronic equatorial mount (very cheap and cheerful would do for wide angle)
and take many long exposures, and stack them - but the moment you try it with
better gear you’ll be wishing you hadn’t bothered!

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mszcz
Oh, ok. Assumed that this would be too good to be true. Thanks anyway! The
equatorial mount would be nice but I thought more along the lines of making a
one-off night sky time lapse video out of curiosity. I gotta stop buying
hardware for one-off fun projects, so this will probaly remain a "some day,
maybe" that never gets done ;)

I'm assuming the dark current is what the camera picks up even when it's 100%
dark? Also, I would need a bigger lens so that I can capture more light right?

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Widdershin
Why take a video instead of just capturing stills and stitching them together,
assuming the end result is a timelapse?

I guess if you've got the storage space and processing power for it, but it
just feels a little wasteful.

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Ididntdothis
I have a Meike 6.5 mm lens for my Fuji X-T3 and have done quite a few time
lapses with this setup. It’s fun to see how the Milky Way rises and you also
get good sense of how the sky rotates around North. The lens is around $150 so
not too bad.

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kqvamxurcagg
Does anyone know good beginner resources or youtube channels to learn about
astronomy?

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DanBC
I liked this book: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sky-Users-David-H-
Levy/dp/052145958...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sky-Users-David-H-
Levy/dp/0521459583)

A nice set of binoculars (something like 8x50 or 10x50) can be had cheap and
will help you learn your way about.

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rkagerer
Anyone know of some software to spot interesting things? Or do I have to train
my own neutral network on what is normal/uninteresting with hours of "boring"
sky?

~~~
dylan604
Stellarium - [https://stellarium.org/](https://stellarium.org/)

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205guy
The article is comically incomplete:

> The complicated part of this arrangement, if you want to have a go at
> building one yourself, is the enclosure.

> Consideration needs to be given to full weatherproofing and heaters need to
> be fitted inside the dome to keep it dew free.

> We’re going to simplify ours by dispensing with the enclosure completely.

They need to collaborate with some makers with a 3D printer.

