All sky Camera

[Gina]

Well done!  I look forward to seeing the results.

[vineyard]

Hello,

Sorry to intrude on this thread - I am starting the process of researching a home-made all-sky cam as well and so this & a few other threads are making interesting & helpful reading (I hope to be able to upgrade my camera to a cooled one later this year, which may leave me an ASI178MC knocking about).

This is probably a daft question, but has anyone ever just secured a sealed dome with the camera on top of a chimney pot and run the USB lead down the chimney (obviously a non-functioning chimney!)).

Thank you,

Vin

[Skipper Billy]

5 minutes ago, vineyard said:

Hello,

Sorry to intrude on this thread - I am starting the process of researching a home-made all-sky cam as well and so this & a few other threads are making interesting & helpful reading (I hope to be able to upgrade my camera to a cooled one later this year, which may leave me an ASI178MC knocking about).

This is probably a daft question, but has anyone ever just secured a sealed dome with the camera on top of a chimney pot and run the USB lead down the chimney (obviously a non-functioning chimney!)).

Thank you,

Vin

You might be better off starting a new thread but to answer your questions - I use a 178MC and I am very happy with it.

USB has a limit of about 5m so unless it's a very short chimney I think you will have issues. 

[Gina]

I too use a 178MC and very happy with it.

[CedricTheBrave]

15 hours ago, vineyard said:

Hello,

Sorry to intrude on this thread - I am starting the process of researching a home-made all-sky cam as well and so this & a few other threads are making interesting & helpful reading (I hope to be able to upgrade my camera to a cooled one later this year, which may leave me an ASI178MC knocking about).

This is probably a daft question, but has anyone ever just secured a sealed dome with the camera on top of a chimney pot and run the USB lead down the chimney (obviously a non-functioning chimney!)).

Thank you,

Vin

I did this on top of a 4m waste pipe it was too high and attracted too much light polution from street lighting so brought it lower down

[Jkulin]

I'm just sorting mine out at the moment and finally went with a RPi because I need to use WiFi because of the distance, I'm using Thomas Jacquins software https://github.com/thomasjacquin/allsky but the only problem is that it currently has to use a ZWO camera as he has only configured using the ZWO sdk, he is currently working on using the QHY and then hopefully the Altair, as I bought a Altair 178MC but unfortunately it doesn't work with his software yet and I'm not clever enough to reprogram the software.

So I managed to grab a ZWO 178MC off fleabay and will use that.

Beware as others have said about too long USB cables, you are limited to 5m with USB 2.0 and I believe 3m with USB3.0, I needed about 7m so thus the reason why I had to go with the RPi otherwise I could have used the Altair.

Edited June 21, 2020 by Jkulin
typos

[vineyard]

Thanks all.  As per @Skipper Billysuggestion above, I've set up a separate thread for my ASC newbie journey to avoid hijacking this one too much!  Cheers & stay safe all.