Moonglow Observatory All Sky Cam

Moonglow Observatory (Warrensburg, Missouri) All Sky Camera

Hit Reload or Refresh to get the latest live webcam image. Click here for just the still image.
A low res movie archive is available at Weather Underground.

Flash movie of past 24 hours (updated hourly, right click it for options):

Latest still image (updated every 10 minutes):

Remapped still image (experimental, please do not report problems):

North East South West North

Latest weather conditions (updated every 10 minutes):

Date/Time: 2010/07/30 18:53 Central, Sun: rise 0615, set 2028

Outdoors: temp 89.7F, hum 70%, dewp 79F, solar 128W/m2
Rain: 0.04", year 36.32", Winds: S at 0mi/hr, gusting 0, sust 0
Extremes: high 91.8F, low 73.3F; Peak winds: gust WSW 15, sust E 0

Indoors: temp 92F, hum 61%, Baro: 29.66inHg

Forecast (unreliable!): Mostly Cloudy, Rain within 12 hours.
Mostly cloudy and cooler. Precipitation possible within 12 hours,
possibly heavy at times. Windy.
Click here for metric.

Weather forecast (updated twice daily):

Cloud camera notes:

This special camera shows the entire sky, from horizon to horizon, day or night, in all weather rain or shine. North is at the top, east is at the left. The camera is mounted atop the Singmaster Educational Center roof, at the Charles Douglas Memorial Observatory, ICSTARS Ranch.
This is a day/night color camera, it sacrifices some nighttime ability in the name of color and daytime images, so at night you won't see more than a couple of stars. On clear moonless nights the Milky Way is visible. Other astronomical objects like the Moon, planets, and zodiacal light are occasionally visible. Most streaks of light you see are airplanes, this camera catches meteors only very rarely.
Image artifacts: During the daytime, intense sunlight will cause a bright vertical bar to appear atop the Sun. Lens and housing reflections will also be visible under certain conditions. The camera's white balance circuit often gets confused and renders colors improperly, most commonly causing a purplish tinge in daytime.
Technical details: Toshiba IK-65WDA wide dynamic range color camera, with Omnitech Robotics 190 degree fisheye lens (1.24mm F2.8), UV/IR cut filter, and C adapter. Captured by an Axis 2400 video server. The Omnitech filter was required because the stock Toshiba filter is too thick to allow the system to reach focus.
The Toshiba camera has some really nasty noise reduction algorithms that interpret stars as noise. This greatly decreases the number of stars visible. To partially combat this, I defocused the lens to spread the star images across a couple of pixels. This brings back bright stars, but makes the image very soft and kills the faint stars. I do not recommend the Toshiba camera for deep sky use. If you can find one, a CNB GN355 camera works better.
The movies are generated on a Linux box using lynx, jpeg2yuv, yuvscaler, mpeg2enc, ffmpeg, and libming.

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