All Sky Camera time lapse from Worcester

[michaelmorris]

After many trials and tribulations, I finally have a fully working all sky (ish) camera. It's based around a ZWO ASi 120 MC with the stock 2.1mm C mount lens and tucked up in a DIY enclosure with acrylic dome.  This is all controlled with Allskeye software.  Here (finally) is a dew-free; hot pixel-free; fixed pattern-free  video.

 

[RT65CB-SWL]

Super! 

[Starlight 1]

Trying to work out the  red bit at 0.33 but it look good and working very well.

[michaelmorris]

4 minutes ago, Starlight 1 said:

Trying to work out the  red bit at 0.33 but it look good and working very well.

That's turning on the red rope light in the observatory for a few minutes (the camera is mounted on the outer wall of the observatory)

[Starlight 1]

Are I see  thanks.

[RichM63]

I want to set up such a camera, but is there a system that can passively watch the sky and then in a micro second or shorter come alive to record an event, register that event, and then slow it down so that we can see what it was?

All within Joe Blogs budget.

[michaelmorris]

 

25 minutes ago, RichM63 said:

I want to set up such a camera, but is there a system that can passively watch the sky and then in a micro second or shorter come alive to record an event, register that event, and then slow it down so that we can see what it was?

All within Joe Blogs budget.

Hi Rich.  yes there is, it's what I call 'pre-emptive motion detection'. I sounds like black magic but it isn't.  Here is how it works.

1. The software continually saves a string of video frames into memory.  Say you are shooting at 25 fps and you tell the software to save 4 seconds to buffer.  This means that you constantly holds 100 frames in memory, as frame 101 is saved, frame 1 drops out of the buffer  and so on and so on ...
2. Whilst the software holds the frames in buffer it analyses them for motion using specific (sometime user-definable) parameters.  If it detects motion, it doesn't drop frames, it just adds them until it no longer detects motion.  
3. It then writes this set of frames to your hard disk as a video file.

This is something of an oversimplification, but in essence it is how it works.

Now, what software can do this trick?

HandyAvi - https://www.azcendant.com/ - good enough for many applications

UFOCapture - http://sonotaco.com/e_index.html - very expensive, but VERY sophisticated

There may well be other bits of software that also have this capability.

I hope this helps

[tooth_dr]

Very nice Michael.  Hope to have my own some day. I bought UFO capture and find it to be excellent for my purposes of meteor detection. 

[RichM63]

Thanks Michael, both links bookmarked.

And this reminds me that I might have a camera that I can perhaps use.

Rich