Cheap All Sky camera project with Raspberry Pi
Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2020 12:35 pm
Hello!
My friend Jani made a program to capture night sky events with cheap RaspberryPi hardware. Now the program is ready and it supports all Raspberry Pi versions and camera modules.
So i build my first All Sky camera using RaspberryPi 4 and 13.2 megapixels Raspberry Pi HQ camera with some 180° lens. With that setup i get images at stunning 4064x3040 pixels resolution.
My goal was to build fully automated high quality night sky / meteorite camera with temperature control inside dome.
After some days of testing with one Raspberry Pi 4 and Meteotux PI . I added a second Raspberry Pi 3+ and V2 color camera with relay controller and temperature sensor in same cover.
Temperature is monitored inside dome and if weather gets cold relays turn heat resistors on. This is done with python script that runs on Raspberry Pi 3+.
Both RaspberryPI 's run with Raspberry PI OS lite. They are automated to run Meteotux PI when sunset and stop when sunrise. This is done with basic Python script that uses Python3 suntime library.
Images are saved to ~/meteotuxpi/images/ and after images are ready at the morning they are moved to NAS storage with wlan+sftp for later processing etc.
MeteotuxPI doesn't take videos but it generates stacked images that wont lose any frames captured directly from camera.
You can for example take one image in every 10 minutes, that one image then contains every single frame (from 0s to 10min) from the camera and program stacks them together in one image. And keep taking those whole night without losing any frames.Max duration of one image stack is 1 hour.
Here's one cropped 10 minute stack example taken with RaspberryPi V2 camera module
Here's some meteorite images ive got so far 
I've made some time lapse videos from stacked images too. You can check them from my youtube channel here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFWiNe ... affH1Mv1SA
I'm really happy with results so far and images can be compared even commercial All Sky cameras that can cost 10000$ and they cant do image stacking and lose frames
My setup above cost around 250$
Cheapest and smallest "travel model" build below cost 30$ that contains RaspberryPi Zero W, V2 color camera with wild angle lens and DC/DC converter.
Now anyone interested in night sky events can build cheap and simple system with Raspberry Pi and Meteotux PI
You can find MeteotuxPI from https://www.meteotuxpi.com
Cheers!
My friend Jani made a program to capture night sky events with cheap Raspberry
So i build my first All Sky camera using Raspberry
My goal was to build fully automated high quality night sky / meteorite camera with temperature control inside dome.
Both Raspberry
Images are saved to ~/meteotuxpi/images/ and after images are ready at the morning they are moved to NAS storage with wlan+sftp for later processing etc.
Meteotux
You can for example take one image in every 10 minutes, that one image then contains every single frame (from 0s to 10min) from the camera and program stacks them together in one image. And keep taking those whole night without losing any frames.Max duration of one image stack is 1 hour.
Here's one cropped 10 minute stack example taken with Raspberry
I'm really happy with results so far and images can be compared even commercial All Sky cameras that can cost 10000$ and they cant do image stacking and lose frames
My setup above cost around 250$
Cheapest and smallest "travel model" build below cost 30$ that contains Raspberry
- mini1.png (127.04 KiB) Viewed 12549 times
- mini2.png (113.93 KiB) Viewed 12549 times
You can find Meteotux
Cheers!
