I wonder if SpaceX could put cameras on the far side of the Starlink satellites to make a network gazing outwards. To help compensate for the frustration they are causing astronomers…
I wonder how long the sensors on those cameras can survive being pointed up at the sky like that. Surely the image quality would deteriorate over time as the sun destroys the sensor until it eventually stops working.
It's great to see these distributed data gathering projects actually be popular and succeed in their plan.
There's one for tracking lightning strikes globally too: www.blitzortung.org
Looked through the Github files and I don't see anything that describes the hardware. This web page shows a picture of the insides of the camera housing (click "Next" once to see the picture):
https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/howitworks.php
The camera is a Watec 902H2 Ultimate, and the lense is one of these:
https://github.com/dcf21/pi-gazing/blob/master/configuration...
Probably the "Siemens 1/2" F1.2 4-12mm Varifocal Auto Iris C Mount CCTV Lens" since the AutoIris port on the camera is connected to the lense in the picture. The video capture is an Easier CAP USB capture device, like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/355668644499
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32832474454.html
The Pi is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B according to the text but the photo caption says it's a Pi Mk 3, maybe either will work. It has a Pi Hat adapter board on the top (POE plugs into it and it seems to have a relay that connects to the camera, maybe to control power to the camera). The camera outdoor housing is made by Genie, looks like a TPH-2000, no longer made, runs on 240V and has a heater:
https://www.citysecuritysystems.co.uk/genie-tph-2000-230v
In the picture, maybe that's the heater board underneath the camera?
Oh, they even have UFOs! https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/moving_obj.php?id=20220114_20...
(BTW, nice overlays below the video player and a neat project overall.)
Could this be used to track sattelites of space debris?
You might need to be imaging in a different wavelength....I'm unsure how this would be done.
I'm disappointed that they passed up the opportunity to call the project Stargazy Pi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazy_pie)
I was hoping this was a diy type of project. I’d love to contribute to something like this.
Unclear what the relationship is with the Global Meteor Network (https://globalmeteornetwork.org/) that has people build meteor cameras, often based on RPis, and then contribute the data so that meteor orbits can be determined.
This site: https://tammojan.github.io/meteormap/ shows the meteors detected over the last 24 hours. You can see that the UK is pretty well covered with cameras as are some parts of Europe. The US is rather sparser -- with only Arizona having good coverage.
Building a camera is fairly easy and is under $200 -- most of the parts can be ordered on Aliexpress.