I’m not sure where to begin, other than like an outdoor security camera, but that isn’t really suitable. I live in a dark sky area in the southwest USA. The skies are gorgeous. I’d like to mount a camera on my roof that can handle night and day, pan 360° and tilt from the horizon to directly overhead to capture sunsets, sunrises, and thunderstorms, take time lapses and long exposures, capture star trails, meteors, and the Milky Way, and if I’m feeling greedy, it’d be nice to detect moving objects in the sky and get images of those. It doesn’t need to take deep images of planets and galaxies. It should pan, tilt, and track to capture vistas; and withstand heat, light, dust, and moderate rain. I want local storage, not cloud services.

I have no idea if this exists or how much it would cost. My budget is modest. Haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill. Any pointers please?

  • br3dEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    If you’re just very slightly techy, it’s surprisingly easy to build an allsky camera using a Raspberry Pi and almost any astronomy camera (I use a ZWO ASI676MC). You install the software and add a weatherproof mount (I use one of these). It films the whole sky, and doesn’t pan/zoom, but you can watch it live, and it automatically captures timelapses and creates star trail images every night, and is very customizable - it can even log meteors