All Sky Camera

The All Sky Camera looks up from the village of Bourn in Cambs, UK. It's fully weatherproof and images the sky 24/7. You can see clouds, stars, sun, contrails, clouds, moon, rain, clouds, and their movements across the sky. Clouds from the left, clouds from the right. Clouds from three different directions simultaneously. Did I mention the clouds? The time-lapse cloudscapes can be facinating and beautiful, if somewhat frustrating for astronomy.

The Sky Now

Image updates every minute with automatic page refresh.

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Time-Lapse Movies

Movies are captured at one frame per minute, and played back at 10 frames per second. You see an hour of sky every 6 seconds. Click on the links below to view the movies.

Alternatively browse and download older time-lapse movies.

Exemplars: Clouds dance, boil and churn. Clouds from the left, clouds from the right, plus contrails. Confused clouds, wind and rain. Cloudy day into clear midsummer night. Clear moonless midsummer night.

The movies are encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. Windows Media Player may require a codec to be installed to view the movies. I would recommend the free Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) for this purpose. Alternatively Linux, Mac and Windows users can download and use the free VLC Media Player.

Technical

The imaging system consists of a Mintron 12V6HC-EX integrating video camera, coupled with a Fujinon YV2.2x1.4A-SA2 fisheye lens. In low-light situations the camera combines multiple frames to image at star-light illumination levels. At night the camera appears to be about as sensitive as dark adapted eyes, and is an excellent way of picking up high cirrus that would not normally be easily visible. The camera is housed in a weatherproof canister previously used to house a old lidar based airport cloud level monitor.

The camera's video output is fed into an Aviosys 9100B-RS video server. The video server has been upgraded with the Yoics firmware hack that provides better Firefox browser support. The box provides a ~15fps feed to any computer on the LAN.

Camera settings are controlled via an RS485/RS232 converter camera-to-PC connection and Mintron's camera control software (63V5H). The software requires RTS/CTS and DTR/DSR/DCD lines to be tied together (a Null Modem conversion), and can only be used on COM1-3.

A Linux based server captures individual images from the video server, creating and storing the various time-lapse movies. The heavy lifting is done with mencoder, and the system is glued together with simple shell script cron jobs.

Similar setups, useful information, and professional observatory all sky cameras: The MMTO Sky Camera, Cloudbait Observatory, JAT Observatory, MASCOT (ESO Parnal), LasCam (ESO La Silla), and The Night Sky Live (CONCAM).

Early experimental nighttime timelapse movie using Canon 20D DSLR and Peleng Fisheye Lens.

All times are UT/GMT. The All Sky Camera is your prototypical Tim and Paul co-production.