All sky cameras online should use lossless format and share with cities and schools and groups
I tracked down your allsky camera images. When will people realize that jpg is a lossy format and that the pixels are not true representations of the intensities and colors of small regions. I call it “eye candy”, only suitable for eyeballs, or the truly desperate who have nothing else. Please ask him to use a lossless format and try to preserve the raw image through the processing. Yes, it might take more work, but then you are sharing data that can be compared mathematically and statistically, not images only useful for looking. If people and groups start archiving and sharing raw data, there are 1.92 Billion first time learners (from 5-20 years) in the world who have no access to sky data for learning. And 4.8 Billion people with some level of access to the Internet. If you have a clear sky camera near to a large city then all those schools and astronomy groups where they cannot see – you can help them – and ask for donors and support and help.
Since you are also giving daytime and night time weather information, you can use javascript apps in browsers to overlay layers to identify things in the night sky. There are also weather patterns, flows and data. So even at night you could overlay the wind speeds and radar images. Eventually, using that kind of data (views of the clouds and sky from many directions continuously) the local and regional weather models will improve, and global standards for sharing weather data overlays worked out. Point your cell phone at the sky to look at clouds and get an overlay of their size, mass, moisture content, temperature, velocities. Same with planes, satellites, comets. There are cosmic ray groups looking at hot pixels in the sensors to track cosmic ray cascades.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
Still with the lossy formats. Please ask him to use PNG, not jpeg if you have to use separate images. There are lossless image sequence formats. SharpCap is using SER. You can share in lossless. Trying to get YouTube and large sites to use lossless. NASA was putting all their Hubble images in jpg. Not a single pixel matched the original. It takes a little more effort and space, but the value for research, comparison and algorithm development is great.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
