Skyzone columbia1/2/2024 ![]() ![]() To protect this hardware from the elements, I housed the Pi, camera, and a suitable wall wart for powering the Pi insideĪ $25 waterproof plastic enclosure. I decided to use a US $60 Raspberry Pi HQ camera over a ZWO camera because it offered higher resolution. A modern Raspberry Pi 4 is recommended, but I used a several-year-old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B simply because I had it on hand. Recognizing that my home is surrounded by trees, I opted for a lens with a narrower (120-degree) field of view. To be truly “all sky,” the camera should be equipped with a fish-eye lens having a 180-degree field of view. Raspberry Pi HQ camera or one of the purpose-built planetary cameras made by ZWO. The hardware for this project consists of a Raspberry Pi and either the So I opted to build a different kind of all-sky camera, one that is also based on a Raspberry Pi but that uses the Raspberry Pi High Quality color camera, following the lead of a project called, reasonably enough, The required components include a Raspberry Pi microcomputer (case not shown), a Raspberry Pi High Quality camera, a lens, a dome-shaped transparent lens cover, a 5-volt power supply, and a waterproof bulkhead connector, allowing AC-mains power to pass through the wall of the waterproof enclosure (not shown) holding the camra. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to capture attractive color images more than I wanted to contribute data to the Global Meteor Network, which uses black-and-white cameras because of their greater sensitivity. I was tempted to join the cause, but after reading more on the subject I discovered alternative strategies for building a camera to survey the night sky. ![]() Global Meteor Network, whose mission is to observe the night sky with “a global science-grade instrument.” Organizers of this network even provide guidance for how anyone can build a suitable camera based on the Raspberry Pi and how to contribute observations that can help determine the orbits of the parent asteroids that spawned particular meteors. These observations allowed the object’s trajectory and landing zone to be estimated, and coverage of the event in The San Francisco Chronicle soon led to the discovery of what became known as the Novato Meteorite.ĬAMS is not the only such project looking for meteors. Images of the meteor were recorded by a project called CAMS (Ĭameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance)-a project of NASA and the SETI Institute. One example occurred in 2012, when a fireball lit up the sky over Northern California. I’m, of course, not the only one to ponder this possibility-and, I soon learned, people have indeed successfully found meteorites this way. My next thought was that if I had a bearing on that luminous streak, and if at least one other person in my region also had such information, we might be able to triangulate on it and narrow down where any landing zone might be. A good-sized chunk of interplanetary detritus must have been on its way to a crash landing not too far away, I said to myself. While driving home one night recently, I saw a spectacularly bright meteor flash across the sky in front of my car. ![]()
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