Comment to All Sky Camera group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/172438633343696
Can someone tell me the current best all sky set up? I was thinking of one that had zoom from all sky to 30x. Any suggestions. Thanks. I was looking at PTZ low light security cameras.
Dan Bush Thank you. Your picture gallery is filled with beautiful images. I searched fro Hikvision cameras and found a few. The average prices was several hundred dollars each. And finding consistent specifications is hard. The spectral sensitivity is available for some sensor, but mostly not easy to find or use.
That 30x was purely an idea to do nightly surveys for many years, extending the whole sky pixels gradually for good seeing opportunities as they happen (one camera looking at everything signals many “lucky” frames, and the PTZ higher magnification ones turn to look deeper, using the registration data from the whole sky camera to narrow in after a fast traverse to get to the right place. An array or cluster of camera, some doing one job and others doing something else.
PTZ cameras are to let viewers go deeper. The human eye can go so far, but an automated all sky has better sensitivity and patience and can register, record and share. Then looking at interesting things is a benefit. Partly to see how best and most efficiently to do it.
I am trying to find low cost “sky” so that every one of the roughly 4.8 Billion people who have some access to the Internet can see and learn from the sky – any time of the day or night, anywhere on earth. It extends the idea of robotic telescopes to all imaging methods and all sensors. I am working with seismometers, gravimeters, magnetometers, radio telescopes, electromagnetic sensor networks, climate model sensors, gravitational wave detectors, thermometer networks, infrasound and many others.
But, while I can read fast and have decades of reading technical and scientific things, and a good skill with math, statistics and computer – I am just one person with finite energy and time. So I would like some help finding good cameras with telescopes to extend live viewing of the universe to all people. The professional observatories on the Internet are the worst, not sharing, charging for everything, not thinking ahead and for all peoples.
Thanks for this. If you have the specific models, maybe you can post that. I don’t have clear sky to justify buying any cameras. The remote sites I tried to approach were all into traditions rich mans astronomy and charge the maximum. No one really just sharing with the whole world. it goes that way. Wish I could compress the last 24 years into a few sentences.
Thanks, I will keep going. Suggestions and ideas welcome.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
