All Sky Camera and other Web-Cams for Footage of Contrail

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
@pseacraft mentioned his All Sky Camera, which is a camera that takes a photo or video of the whole sky using a fisheye lens, typically mounted on a roof:


These seem most frequently used for astrophotography, specifically to record things like meteors which are impossible to predict - so they are set to run all night, and then the photos are reviewed for the interesting ones:


They can, of course, be set up to run 24 hours, and some people do, which gives very interesting time-lapse footage of clouds and contrails.Example:


Some people put their cameras online, and archive old footage. For example:
http://www.beskeen.com/projects/allskycam/allskycam.shtml

Which has daily 24 hour archives going back to 2008.
http://farm.ecoscentric.com:12330/allskycam/

I think the existence of such things is very useful, as it gives a proper statistical sample of the sky by which you can judge the frequency of things like persistent contrails. The claim is often made that the sky is covered with contrails every day, all the time. But upon inspection this generally proves to be selective memory. It would be great if there was some way this could be demonstrated using footage from cameras like these.
 
Mine is a rather inexpensive one but the designer/manufacturer hosts his customers feeds on his website. Here is mine:

http://www.allskycam.com/u.php?u=465

As Mick has pointed out the time lapse is actually quite impressive to watch particularly when you are primarily using it to monitor the weather.

Cheers Mick!
 
I was wondering if I could make one from an old iPhone, a long USB cable, a plastic dome and a $10 fisheye lens.
 
Great. Except for when the sun's out. There's power in sunshine.

Yes, I thought of that too. Might be interesting to make a box that could be placed anywhere without cables. Then I could just bung it on the roof.
 
ok the cricket completely freaked me out. ; )

I think its a spider not a cricket. I am constantly having to spray the mast its mounted on to get arid of the spiders. The Magpies like to perch on it too.

I am rather lazy about cleaning it as it's mounted on a 4 meter mast next to my swimming pool. I had it mounted on my water tank on the roof but my long cable failed and procuring one locally is like pulling teeth from a leopard unsedated.

With the costs of many All Sky Camera being so cheap I was discouraged from making my own.
 
@pseacraft mentioned his All Sky Camera, which is a camera that takes a photo or video of the whole sky using a fisheye lens, typically mounted on a roof:


These seem most frequently used for astrophotography, specifically to record things like meteors which are impossible to predict - so they are set to run all night, and then the photos are reviewed for the interesting ones:


They can, of course, be set up to run 24 hours, and some people do, which gives very interesting time-lapse footage of clouds and contrails.Example:


Some people put their cameras online, and archive old footage. For example:
http://www.beskeen.com/projects/allskycam/allskycam.shtml

Which has daily 24 hour archives going back to 2008.
http://farm.ecoscentric.com:12330/allskycam/

I think the existence of such things is very useful, as it gives a proper statistical sample of the sky by which you can judge the frequency of things like persistent contrails. The claim is often made that the sky is covered with contrails every day, all the time. But upon inspection this generally proves to be selective memory. It would be great if there was some way this could be demonstrated using footage from cameras like these.

Absolutely beautiful photo
 
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