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.
• The movies are generated on a Linux box using lynx, jpeg2yuv, yuvscaler, mpeg2enc, ffmpeg, and libming.

Click here to return to the home page.

© 2005-2006 Fred Bruenjes - All Rights Reserved. Image inlining (hotlinking) and/or framing are strictly prohibited. No reproduction, dissemination, repackaging, hosting, or other use of these images is allowed without written permission.