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All-sky cameras

george7378

By george7378
in The Astro Lounge

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george7378

george7378

Posted
Posted

Well, it's cloudy at the moment and I may not see any Geminids tonight (oh well - there's still another couple of days of shower peak left!), but I was wondering about all sky cameras - are there any commercial models available, and how much would it cost to operate one? Does anyone have a meteor camera? I quite like the idea of having my own little eye on the sky.

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SiriusB

SiriusB

Posted
Posted

You Could try a circular fisheye lens on a film or digital slr George, Errr they're not exactly cheap though, even second hand... kinda fancy one myself, but can't justify the expense!

Sure you want whole sky coverage? a wide angle pointed somewhere towards the current showers radiant might be a better & cheaper option.

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pete_l

pete_l

Posted
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You could try cheating.

Occasionally I've seen polished metal decorative balls in garden crentres. They're about a foot across. If you get one of those and mount a webcam above it, so the sphere takes up the whole field of view, you'll get an image of whatever the sphere reflects. That will be everything around it - so a 180° field of view.

There will be a reflection of the webcam itself in the centre of the field, but it'll be quite small.

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pete_l

pete_l

Posted
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You don't need to spend thousands on an all-sky camera. I've got a FC-E8 fisheye lens for my point-and-shoot Nikon CP5000. Th lens was about £100 some years ago and needs an adapter to screw it on, in front of the pop-out camera lens. It gives a pretty good all-round view, though like all fisheyes, it is pretty distorted at the edges.

Just to show what sort of pictures it takes, heres one I took a few summers ago. It's a 2 minutes unguided exposure which is cropped down a bit

marlowfisheyedce.jpg

This is an unprocessed image. Contrary to appearences the sky was actually quite dark that night.

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LukeSkywatcher

LukeSkywatcher

Posted
Posted
you can get wireless webcams with built in webservers, I have a couple watching my fishtank :)Carlsburp - Probably the best Burping Frog in the World - index They just need to have a wireless wifi router to connect to the outside world

Hi Kev. Would these cameras be good for security (hidden cams around the house)?. I was burgled over the weekend and am thinking of installing a couple of hidden cams around the house that can record and upload to a server so i can watch the footage back afterwards if the need arises.

Have you got a link to where i can buy the cameras or just take a look even?

Cheers

Paul.

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Photosbykev

Photosbykev

Posted
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Hi Kev. Would these cameras be good for security (hidden cams around the house)?. I was burgled over the weekend and am thinking of installing a couple of hidden cams around the house that can record and upload to a server so i can watch the footage back afterwards if the need arises.

Have you got a link to where i can buy the cameras or just take a look even?

Cheers

Paul.

Hi Paul, they are made by a lot of suppliers, the main manufacturers would Axis/ Panasonic / Sony but there are a lot of cheaper ebay suppliers selling them. Look for Wifi webcam and webserver. Most will have IR lighting for night vision but treat the range they quote with a pinch of salt and half it.

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Breakintheclouds

Breakintheclouds

Posted
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I was thinking about an all-sky webcam a couple of months back. I found various websites where people had had a lot of success sticking the fisheye lenses from door peepholes to webcams. For example:

The Aggregate: Fisheye Digital Imaging For Under Twenty Dollars

Another one here

You could easily marry the webcam to some suitable image capture software. I'm a Linux man, so I'd use 'motion' which monitors a webcam and saves images when it detects movement. No idea what exists on other platforms, but there must be something.

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E621Keith

E621Keith

Posted
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Many years ago I read a book on comets and meteor observation, but I can't remember the name now. Anyway there was a photo of a rig with 4 SLRs, each covering a quadrant of the sky.

With price of used DSLR from yesteryear costing about as much as a mid range eyepiece, it should be possible to knock together something like that for a reasonable price.

Put it on an EQ5 and you get yourself a home brewed superWASP. :)

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