We’ve installed an Allsky camera on the beach. This camera aims a wide-angle lens straight up, and captures sky events like star trails, meteors, and maybe an occasional aurora borealis.
The camera operates only at night. When you visit Scootercam’s Allsky page during daylight hours, you’ll find NOAA’s latest aurora forecast map, instead of the camera’s live view:
A Raspberry Pi 5 with solid-state drive, 12mp camera, and 120° wide-angle lens are mounted inside a length of 4″ drain pipe. Thomas Jacquin’s Raspberry Pi Allsky Camera does the rest.
Here’s the latest image – North is at the top. Left is East, right is West:
At night, long exposures and other adjustments bring out stars you didn’t know were there. Of course, we’re in for a slog of cloudy weather now, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Let’s hope for some clear, moonless nights.
Inside the tube
That’s 12-volt DC power coming in from 100′ of 16 gauge landscape wire, with a 12 -> 5 volt converter’s USB-C output running a Raspbrerry Pi 5 board with SSD storage. An HQ camera with Arducam 120° wide-angle lens tops it off. This fits inside a capped section of 4″ drain pipe, with an acrylic dome covering the lens opening. I’m hoping the board’s inherent heat, internal fan, and a few bags of silica gel take care of condensation issues.
Powering things on the beach
Most of Scootercam’s operations are ‘power-over-ethernet’ hardware. Both beach cameras and both weather sensors (the thermometers, etc) are POE, and all work fine (so far? psyche!). But we have decent wifi available on the beach, so rather than split off more POE hardware, this piece uses the wifi. Still needs power.