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 the rest is all scripted. I kick off the images at 10PM now that it’s summer, and cut that off at 4:30am or so.
I have a script that uses ImageMagick to take the image info and put it up in the left corner of each frame. That takes typically a half hour or so to process the few thousand stills. Then I have a script that simply lists all the JPg files so that FFMPEG can build a time lapse video.
@Damobius you could probably use an older/slower Pi if you were just going to take pictures, but I’d worry a little about the lag time between shots. That’s not a crisis, but you might get only 3 to 4 ten second exposures per minute that way. Easy to miss stuff with gaps like that.
@Damobius I should also mention that the v2 cameras and prior have a shutter limitation of 6 seconds.
Okay, I finally got around to gathering the hardware to get this started. I can't find a link to the scripts you are using though (if you posted any...it's been a month). Do you have them reposited anywhere? Going to get with our 10 this weekend and start construction.
@Damobius happy to help- help me level set- are you familiar with apt-get installations? If I said “install ImageMagick” is that enough, or should I be more granular? Either way is fine, I just mean to start at where it’s helpful.
@MookyTroubadour I've set up Ubuntu servers with some add-ons like a Minecraft server so I can follow instructions and know the basics of command line (I set up the server as a headless media server) but I'm no guru. I have access to Pluralsight though 😁
@Damobius oh, and the scripts aren’t posted anywhere- they aren’t especially complex, so I just wrote them ad hoc, and will gladly share. I’m getting the best results with No Infrared filters, but that’s not an absolute requirement. Which camera did you get? I’ve also moved to the newer Libcamera versus Raspistill, but the parameter argument for duration hasn’t been reliable for me, so I use crontab to start and stop.
@MookyTroubadour here's my equipment list:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2019 Quad Core 64 Bit WiFi Bluetooth (4GB) https://a.co/d/7hfDuUA
Arducam for for Raspberry Pi 4/3/3 B+, https://a.co/d/95oabvo
SanDisk 256GB High Endurance Video microSDXC Card - SDSQQNR-256G-GN6IA https://a.co/d/2SYop1n
Vilros Raspberry Pi 4 Compatible Heavy Duty Aluminum Alloy Case https://a.co/d/4kObcpV
@MookyTroubadour I'll likely be building a weatherproof but vented case out of either wood or steel with a Plex viewing window
@Damobius okay, cool.
I’ve not used that camera, so it’ll be interesting to see which settings work best. Lately I’ve been building with the 64 bit Pi OS, though I don’t know that it makes any difference.
At a high level, this is the sequence I’ve been using:
1) build weather-able enclosure. (I used acrylic domes, but have moved to glass)
2) load OS (don’t use default credentials)
3) install ImageMagick
4) wait for dark and test camera parameters (using Libcamera-still and seeing what gets best images- I’ll give examples)
5) write shell scripts to: (continuing)
@Damobius
6) time lapse image collection (anywhere from every 5-6 seconds or 15 if supported. Longer shots may show star movement)
7) stop with separate script, since the duration argument seems dodgy.
8) use ImageMagick to put date/time overlay on the images from Exif values
9) make a list of all the (date stamped) images
10) build MP4 video using ffmpeg (included by default in OS build)
11) rename by date and store where I like
@Damobius you may find that the level of writing/overwriting may be a bit of a problem for your sd card. I’ve been using SSD’s as they’re so cheap. You can get a usb to SSD adapter for $12 or so, and a 128GB SSD these days under $20z. That’ll speed things up plenty, and be less sensitive for high read/write/overwrite loads. That’s more FYI- not an up front requirement kind of deal.
@MookyTroubadour this one should be okay. It's designed for high speed continuous writes. They're used in dash cams and the like, and I assume this will be a similar situation to that.
@MookyTroubadour okay! Going to start doing homework on libcamera and ImageMagik, and brush up my Linux scripting 😁. This is exciting! Since I'm not using curved Plex I'm hoping distortion is held to a minimum but will see how it goes. Thanks so much for the rundown!
@MookyTroubadour
I've got an old nanocomp in the closet that I could easily turn into another Ubuntu file server to collect the output.
As usual, I bite off a mouthful of apple and start chewing the whole tree 🤦♂️