Wow! I’m reviewing my sky camera captures and there were some great meteors on the night of the 28th/29th.
@MookyTroubadour sky camera...something like a dashcam with a high capacity card aimed at the sky?
🤔🤔 That's an interesting idea!
@Damobius I use a raspberry pi and raspberry pi cams of various versions. The images you see here are the pic camera v3 with no IR filter. It lives under an acrylic dome and takes 10 second exposures back to back (there is a little lag- intend to get 5 shots per minute). I have everything scripted and it compiles all the still images into a movie for me to download. If you want to give it a go, it’s maybe $150 ish in hardware, and I can share my scripts.
@MookyTroubadour that sounds like a fun project for our 10-year old and I. If it's an easy share without taking too much of your time, I'd certainly be interested in seeing it!
@Damobius it an issue at all. I have several that are pointed in different parts of the sky, and only one is giving me any issue that has to do with making the movie. I’m suspecting it might be because I have the 64 bit OS on that ones. FFMPEG makes the videos, and might not like the 64 bit OS. I continue to poke at it.
@MookyTroubadour I've got a Pi that I haven't used for a decade but it's really ancient, like 1st gen old. There are a ton of alts out now too. Gonna have to start brushing the cobwebs out of my tech brain. You using Python?
@Damobius for the date stamp, that uses software called Imagemagick (free) and the video uses FFMPEG (also free).
You're getting me excited. Def a great fall project for our family!
@Damobius happy to help if you want to give it a whirl. :)
Going to spend a couple days researching and will be collecting this info!
Know the area. I grew up in Seattle's North End. I miss it.
Found my case...
GeeekPi Raspberry Pi 4 Case, Raspberry Pi 4 Case with Cooling Fan, Raspberry Pi 4 Heatsink, Retro Gaming Nes4Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B/4B https://a.co/d/cBYLBOq
@Damobius it’s got delightful retro panache, but I don’t know that’d it’d stand up to rain or the elements :)
@MookyTroubadour yeah, it'd need some additional weatherproofing 😄
@Damobius as an FYI, I’m exploring using alternatives to acrylic domes. They tend to catch strange reflections, and aren’t especially optically true. I made a 180mm box for gear and made a lid with a hole for a dome, but now I’m trying a modified roof shape with a rectangular cut out over which I’ll silicon seal a phone screen protector bit of gorilla glass. As long as water sheds off of it reasonably well, I think this might be better.
I was wondering about optical distortion. Good to know. Thanks!
@Damobius the trade off as far as I can tell is that the v2 is more like film in that a meteor streak looks like what you’d expect. The v3 camera will sometimes make the meteors look like dotted lines. It has to do with how the “shutters” function. The v3 NoIR is so much more sensitive. Those images I shared are from a city with horrid light pollution (Tacoma, WA)