Pi SkyCam - design thoughts

[skybadger]

Hi all

I am planning to build an all sky camera for dome rain alerting, cloud alerting, all-sky meteor surveying and finally continuous photometry on a wide field of stars.

This lot is a consequence of a 'doing one thing - so why not do some more ?' approach.

The basic idea is that the camera monitors the sky in repeated long exposure (say 30 secs) mode all night to measure cloud coverage and monitor a rain sensor to support dome automation.

The camera could be a simple camera feeding a pc but I wanted to add more value to this by giving it a but of local intelligence to run more sensors at low power using a Pi. Hence why didn't I add a function to save images with interesting things happening in them for later inspection, say meteors, lightning etc.

Having done that I am still left with images of the sky hopefully full of stars that I would otherwise discard. So why don't I plate solve them using something like astrometry, add the WCS coordinates to the image and then run them through OSCAAR to do photometry on the stars and see if I can get something useful like rapid light curves or minor planet occultations or just continuous multi-day photometry ?

Finally, I could add a web server to host the days catch of images and a sql server to host the measured photometry and image records.

Hence the requirement for intelligence.

Tee things I have are the ZWO ASI120mm camera with wide-angle lens, a clear acrylic cover and a Pi.

There is a driver for the Pi to talk to the ASI in the form of a native driver and an INDI driver. I have installed python on the Pi to run the camera - the choice of software here is open but DCD springs to mind to EKOS but I don't really want to run a gui. Any more thoughts on more options for this ?

The next step is to install astrometry.net. Not trivial but not impossible. This all needs to be command line driven and I have yet to check this.

Next is OSCAAR. The scipy and astronomy support libraries in here allow identifying all the stars in an image, extracting their locations and then doing the photometry on them. This also sounds doable.

Finally a small webserver with extensions for server-side python and MySQL or its current replacement.

Barring the size of the code base, and the speed ( which might drive images to be cached and the processed throughout the day...) any thoughts on improvements to this or bits obviously missing ?

Cheers

Mike