Comment on Facebook Allsky Camera group site
https://www.facebook.com/groups/172438633343696
Do you know of even one allsky camera on the Internet that shares live lossless images? And archives lossless images for stacking, research, correlations? The usual photos of stars and planets on the Internet are in jpg, or compressed video, so the pixels are not real pixels. The location and properties of the camera not shown or complete. Only suitable for human viewers, what I call eye candy. Are there groups sharing algorithms to extract more from all sky cameras, develop global methods?
I tried to find information about using Raspberry Pi 4 8G with HQ camera for all sky. I found tens of thousands of astronomy groups, but they all encourage looking through a telescope at a tiny piece of the sky. But new learners need to know the whole sky.
I found tens of thousands of live webcams, all is lossy formats, but not completely useless. Many have half the image with sky. If you schedule when a webcam will have good seeing and see the thing you are interested in, then it is possible to stitch together images and related data streams.
Most cities in the world you cannot see the sky. In the US about 89% of people live in large cities. In the world, half. I live in Houston and never see the sky clearly. And the whole city does not have a space-borne clear sky all sky satellite looking at the whole sky — 24/7, lossless, high resolution, archived, easy to use, all the tools readily available for browsing, all the methods clearly mapped and accessible and usable.
These are a few of the things I have been thinking about. All those astronomy clubs, two billion first time learners from 5 to 21, all that money for Hubble and Webb etc. And no way for everyone to see their sky all the time in real time. And then study it deeply, if they want.
Every webcam, every camera in the world, could monitor the sky for comets, asteroids, weather, focus on the moon, on satellites, planes. Every one can have exactly registered, non destructive overlays to identify and dig deeper to all that is known about things in the sky. Not weeks and months of digging for each thing. Not just things to look at, read about, hear about, but never actually get to use. Same for all the telescopes – especially publicly-funded ones and those that say they are for everyone.
Suppose a million people point their cell phones, cameras, cameras with telescopes (not telescopes with cameras) at the moon. What can you learn from that? How far can you interpolate and estimate subpixels when all the light from the sun and moon, and cities can be traced? And there are thousands or millions of overlapping simultaneous and sequential observations? In a city with intermittent seeing for each person, can a full sky be extracted from all their data?
Suppose a million people point their cell phones, cameras, cameras with telescopes (not telescopes with cameras) at the moon. What can you learn from that? How far can you interpolate and estimate subpixels when all the light from the sun and moon, and cities can be traced? And there are thousands or millions of overlapping simultaneous and sequential observations? In a city with intermittent seeing for each person, can a full sky be extracted from all their data?
Besides optical image recordings, there are software define radio networks starting to cover the sky. Radio telescopes, cameras on satellites and planes and drones, seismometer networks, gravimeter networks, gravitational detector networks, infrasound, magnetic detector networks, meteorological networks. An increasing global flood of data that never leaves the detectors and gets to anyone, except in dribs and drabs of eye candy, or undocumented and untraceable form. I work with most of the data and algorithms. I know they can be standardized and accessible to everyone in near real time, cross correlated, and the archives truly accessible and connected.
Thanks for listening.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
