Camera(s) in your Observatory.

[lazjen (Chris)]

For my ongoing epic-ly slow quest to automate everything, I've been thinking about putting in 1 or 2 cameras in the dome to see what the mount, scope and shutters are actually doing.

So if you've done this or have suggestions, I'd like to hear them. Is there anything to be aware of?

[doppler (Rick)]

You would need a pretty sensitive low light cam as you would not have any lights on while imaging.

I sometimes use teamviewer to remotely control my camera and scope guiding from inside the house. I guess it would be pretty simple to add a web cam to the ob's laptop to see what's happening.
Rick

[Imme (Jon)]

I use a very cheap Chinese webcam (ebay) without any infra red leds and it works an absolute treat. On the darkest of nights under a very dark sky I can still clearly see everything that’s going on via Remote Desktop.

Camera wouldn’t have been more than $10 from memory

[lazjen (Chris)]

Great idea. I'll have to trawl ebay sometime to see what I can find. Do you have any links or brand information for the webcam you got?