Allsky is epic!

I recently setup Allsky to take images of the night sky with a raspberry pi and a spare wide angle astrophotography lens. The project is described here and the code is here. I was amazed at how well the software worked after installation with minimal tweaking! You don't have to have a ton of Unix experience to get this working.

Allsky is software that runs on a raspberry pi and then takes images every x seconds using a wide angle USB camera. I seriously lucked out and used this camera for free (!) which my family was not currently using. If you are into astrophotography/astronomy maybe you are fortunate enough to have a spare camera as well. If so, this would be a good use for it! The photos Allsky takes are used to create epic timelapse movies of the stars, star trails, and keograms (see the code for a good description). 

To get this all to work, I made a quick case out of a plastic tupperware to protect the raspberry pi and then I had the camera out of the case and I used an outdoor extension cord to provide power. I tried to use a phone battery pack I had on hand to power it without a cord, but the voltage supply was variable so I just ran an extension cord instead. This is what my setup looked like:

Good enough for now! The project has everything fit nicely in a piece of pipe with an acrylic dome to go over the camera. Eventually I will make something like this to protect everything. For now I am bringing it inside if there is weather.

The program is awesome! After taking a photo every X seconds set by the user all night, it will generate a star trails image for you. Here is what my image looked like:

The individual photos that make up the star trails look like the photo below. These are the images collected every X seconds all night.

Check out this page for a live example!