Graham’s Allsky Project

Welcome to my Allsky project site!

This page provides an overview of my Allsky setup for anyone who is interested in the detail of my setup. My implementation is of course based on the awesome Allsky project, details and source code can be found here. I have been experimenting with the Allsky setup since December 2023 but it has only gone live May 2024.

To be fair, my location in Wellington New Zealand, is not the most ideal place to carry out astrophotography since the weather is usually not that great, but that said, the Southern Hemisphere does offer great viewing when the skies are clear.

Below is a few pictures showing where my Allsky camera setup is mounted on my roof, placed in a way so that there is no external object interference and minimal light pollution from surrounding city and buildings. There was some intermittent light polution from the neigbours houses but I've sorted that by adding a black box surround, which seems to make a difference. Wellington is a very very windy place, so the unit is securely bolted to a plywood platform using a hand-crafted aluminium bracket. There are wooden blocks at either end to stop movement in any direction.

The unit itself is a waterproof PVC sealed ABS box enclosure that I figured would be sufficient given our climate. There are two cables running from the unit, a blue Cat 5e cable, which is used for power and connectivity, and a 12V power supply for the dew heater (explained later). A traditional Perspex dome from Amazon covers the camera lens and is sealed with a waterproof sealant, as are the cables. A removable dome would have been better but as this is my first attempt I didn’t realise the dome I had ordered wasn’t the best solution, still it works.

Here’s a few pictures showing where my Allsky camera setup is mounted on the roof.

Setup

• Raspberry Pi and Camera: I utilise a Raspberry Pi 4b with 8Gb RAM with the latest operating system as per the Allsky guidelines. Attached is a Raspberry Pi HQ 12 MP camera with an Arducam CS 120 deg. ultra wide angle (UWA) lens, with 3.2mm focus length, manual focus and F 2.0 with fixed iris.
• POE Setup: I've added a POE HAT to the Pi and power this from a POE hub in the house, running a Cat 5E cable over the roof (the POE HAT includes a fan for cooling which is needed). Originally, I was running a standard Raspberry Pi PSU but had various power issues and problems of connectivity with my home Wi-Fi, so the POE solution fixed both these issues.
• Dew Heater: Originally when I set up the Allsky during summer in NZ I had no issues with condensation, but now that we’re in winter I've had to add a dew heater as per the circuit below (made out of some resistors and driven by a relay). The condensation was very bad rendering the images unusable. The dew heater is all automatically controlled and configured through the Allsky Dew Heater user module (these modules are separate to the core Allsky modules but can be found on GitHub here). I’ve configured mine to use an Adafruit BME280 sensor which triggers the heater when there is a 10 - 12 deg. difference between the ambient temperature and the calculated dew point. It produces about 5 watts of heat and does a good job at controlling the condensation in the dome.
• Openweather API: I also use the Openweather API (API key required) as I was interested in the outside temperature (outside the dome) and overlay this on the live view image. This is refreshed every 5 mins but temporarily turned off due to some weird AllSKy issue where the PHP module doesn't load the temperature values consistently.
• Focusing the Lens: One of the most irritating things when I first set up my Allsky was focusing the lens, which in my case is manually controlled (due to the lens type). Firstly, I totally forgot to remove the CS attachment which wasn’t needed but I also missed the point of the back front focus options on my Arducam lens but once I understood how it worked I was able to get a better focus. But even then I found when I needed to do tuning it was a pain, up on the roof, plugging in the laptop, command line software couldn’t see dark night images blah blah. So, I added a remote focus capability that allows me to remotely control the lens focus from the command line of the Pi using some Python code I wrote, this controls both the back and front focus. There are two stepper motors which drive cogs on the lens, controlled via a nice UI I developed in Tkinter that can be started from the command line or VNC session. The cogs probably should have been 3D printed to allow for better movement but instead I went for a cheaper option from AliExpress. Back focus is the key to initially lock on and focus, which is then refined by the front focus. See the picture below for the setup.
• Remote Web Site: My remote web site is actually my local Synology DS218 NAS server, and this is exposed externally via a No-ip domain name which you are using now :-) Note that some Corporates and Service Providers might not permit access to this link as it uses DDNS, which can be a security risk (although mine is not).
• NAS Setup: The NAS setup requires PHP and also permissions need to be set properly otherwise it won’t create the thumbnails - change local groups http user access to R/W. Also I dont save all the raw images once they are transferred from the Pi to the NAS server.
• Finicky Setup: The Allsky setup is very finicky and there are many parameters with Allsky, which are not always clear but ultimately do make sense. It pays to read and re-read the documentation site. It can be confusing to understand the parameters relating to local web server vs remote and the general config.sh settings. Because I'm using a HD Pi camera I had to adjust the video codec ('libx265' along with 'TIMELAPSE_EXTRA_PARAMETERS=-x265-params crf=30) to allow higher resolution timelapse videos to be created (which can take over 5 hours!), something I only found out later on, so you will see some of my earlier timelapses will have a lot of pixelisation prior to 12 August 2024.
• Image Transfer: The setup is that as images are recorded by the Pi (at night as opposed to day), these are file transferred (FTP) to the NAS, so they are then accessible to anyone on the Internet. I should qualify this, the individual might images are not transferred as there are just too many, they remain on the PI for around 2 weeks before being deleted. I do however save the most interesting images and add them to the gallery.
• Google Analytics: I also have Google Analytics setup on my web pages to monitor usage.

Here’s further pictures showing my Allsky camera setup.

Gallery

Contact

Drop me an email if you have any questions or would like access to the raw image files.

Email: graham.prowse119@gmail.com