What is Allsky and How to Build

AllSky cameras are a great way to keep a watch on what happens above our heads. A sealed camera in a watertight housing taking pictures at set intervals.

Timelapse with an AllSky Camera is pretty awesome and something I personally look forward to viewing every morning. Throughout the night the AllSky is taking many pictures and once the sun starts to come up those pictures are turned into a sort of short movie. You can see the stars moving above as the Earth rotates or you may even catch a meteorite or two.

Timelapse

StarTrails with an AllSky camera is another way the images taken throughout the night can be used. A startrail image is a single image of all the images stacked together. This stacked image shows streaks of light or the trail each star made in the night sky.

Startrails

Keograms with an AllSky camera is a very interesting way to have a quick view of what occurred in the nights sky. Originally created to study the aurora borealis and now widely used in AllSky cameras by amateurs like me. Each image taken overnight has one vertical row of pixels copied and stitched together in a row to form a keogram.

Keogram

I have recently built an AllSky camera and would like to share with you what I used and how I built it. I do hope to eventually link the Timelapse video and current images to PhotonPup.com so you can all watch when you want.

Anyway, on to the build. Hyperlinks provided to the materials I used.

3d printed camera cradle is where I started once I acquired all materials. The cradle had been printed on an Anycubic i3 S using ABS plastic.
Cut a hole just big enough for the camera to slip into and secured it with the 3d printed cradle.
Everything is wired up and ready to go. You can see the Pi4 4gb in the upper left of the box and the two 50mm fans. This also shows the back to the 3d printed cradle and power supply.
Outside just running 24/7.