AllSky Setup

We are using the Starlight Xpress Oculus all sky camera.  We have a fairly basic mounting set up on the hot tub enclosure, it’s not an ideal mounting, but it works and gives us a good view of the sky at night. Allsky Camera Hidden in the rafters of the enclosure is a small embedded computer running an indi server to provide images over the network. Initially we have a fairly basic program running on a server in the closet which just takes images from the allsky camera and formats the for web display, then updates the image being served on the allsky page.  There are lots of plans and thoughts around expanding the capabilities, but for now, the goal was to have a live display of images from the camera that we can view with a web browser, and for that, this works. A closer view of the camera and it’s mounting here: Oculus close up On a good night, the all-sky images can be very impressive at this location.  The video was created by running 15 second exposures from sundown till sunrise, creating jpeg images from each exposure, then glueing them all together into a movie. At 1:22 of this video there is a fairly nice display of the northern lights.