Allsky Camera

A couple of years back I decided to build an allsky camera setup.

Build

I started with a Pi 4 and RPI HQ camera - and I grabbed a plastic dome and waterproof box.

Over time - it got updated to a Pi 5 with Waveshare combined M.2 Sata/PoE hat - so now it takes power from the network cable and has a more stable disk than an SD card.

Click to view full size: 3D print showing mounting

Click to view full size: Camera mounted

Click to view full size: Camera assembly

Click to view full size: Assembly on box

Setup

The camera is now on the garage roof.

Public view is available at https://allsky.chrissearle.org/

It contains the latest live image, and nightly generated keograms, timelapses and star trail images.

Click to view full size: Current image

Timelapse

One per 24 hours - generated when moving from night to day each day.

Star trail

A single image showing any stars for the night - generated at the end of night each day.

Keogram

Quoted from https://github.com/AllskyTeam/allsky#keograms

Click to view full size: Sample keogram

A Keogram is an image giving a quick view of the day's activity. For each image a central vertical column 1 pixel wide is extracted. All these columns are then stitched together from left to right. This results in a timeline that reads from dawn to the end of nighttime (the image above only shows nighttime data since daytime images were turned off).

Since the instance I am running has auto-gain enabled there will be some hops in brightness across the keogram.