My goal was to build fully automated high quality night sky / meteorite camera with temperature control inside dome.
After some days of testing with one Raspberry Pi 4 and Meteotux PI. I added a second Raspberry Pi 3+ and V2 color camera with relay controller hat and temperature sensor. Temperature is monitored inside dome and if weather gets cold relays turn heat resistors on. This is done with python script that runs on Raspberry Pi 3+.
Both Raspberry PI's run with Raspberry PI OS lite. They are automated to run Meteotux PI when sunset and stop when sunrise. This is done with basic Python script that uses Python3 suntime library. Images are saved to ~/meteotuxpi/images/ and after images are ready at the morning they are moved to NAS storage with wlan+sftp.
Meteotux PI doesn't take videos but it generates stacked images that wont lose any frames captured directly from camera.
You can for example take one image in every 10 minutes, that one image then contains every single frame (from 0s to 10min) from the camera and program stacks them together in one image. And keep taking those whole night without losing any frames.
Below is one "cropped" 10 minute stacked image. Max image resolution is stunning 4064x3040 pixels.
I'm really happy with results so far and images can be compared even commercial All Sky cameras that can cost 10000$ and they cant do image stacking :)
Last night got same meteor with both cameras :) Both images are cropped.
Above image is taken with normal Raspberry Pi V2 color camera. Meteotux PI options used (-d 120 -e7000 -g4)
Image below is taken with Raspberry Pi HQ camera with 180 lens. Meteotux PI options (-d 60 -e10000 -g4)
Sample strartrails video made from Meteotux PI stacked images
Hi!
Just a little update here. If you use Raspberry Pi OS (bullseye) and try to run Meteotux PI you will get error Error: Camera maximum exposure time is 0 ms
To fix this you need to enable Legacy Camera support. Use sudo raspi-config select Interface Options and enable Legacy Camera support and after reboot Meteotux PI will run ok.
Cheers!