Living in the Huon Valley, in Southern Tasmania, I’m lucky to have some amazing night skies with the minimal light pollution, as well as amazing auroral displays semi-regularly, being 42 degrees South. In November of 2023 I decided to build an Allsky camera. If the camera is running, it is available at allsky.rigby.systems/allsky/
The Allsky Project is an open-source project started by Thomas Jacquin, with a few active developers maintaining and contributing to the project. I want to give a shout out to Eric Claeys who gave me a bit of assistance when I added support for a new camera. This project allows hobbyists to build astrophotography cameras which capture the whole sky. The software includes a configuration web server and public webserver, with the software building time-lapses, star trail and keogram images at the end of each night. Running on a Raspberry Pi, connected to a suitable camera, the software takes images all through the night, adjusting the exposure and gain to get really great photos of the night sky.
Last year I refreshed my desktop computer after ten years, I bought a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card, PSU, along with new SSDs and fans, however I reused the same case. I kept my old PC parts so that I could reuse them for a portable “pelican case” PC/cyberdeck. As I go to sea on long voyages, being able to play games newer than the original Counter-Strike and Age of Empires II on the work laptop would be great.
On the twelth of May 2024, Tasmania was blessed with an amazing aurora. I’d been lucky enough to build an allsky camera that had been placed out at Huon Bush Retreats. It managed to capture the following timelapse video:
In addition to this footage, I managed to get some cool timelapse footage in August 2024 of an aurora, with a camera that had no IR filter. This meant it captured both Visible light and Near-Visible Infrared light:
