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Originally Posted by Garbz
This may get complicated from an algorithm point of view. I was intending to go down the route on >80% humidity switch on all dew heaters to a pre-set point.
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Fair enough. I was mainly thinking that for optics, you want as little heating as possible - e.g. on my RC8 and manually controlled heaters, I get better FWHM numbers without heaters, provided that it doesn't dew up. However, I usually err on the side of too much heat / poorer FWHMs because it's less risky than losing a whole night's worth of subs.
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Why IR temp sensor? What advantage over the existing humidity and temperature sensor?
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Cloud detection - i.e. use the IR sensor to read the sky temperature. If it's much lower than the ambient / ground temperature, then assume clear skies. Otherwise, if it's similar to the ambient temperature, there's a good chance of cloud. Perhaps something like this:
http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?product_id=1045_1
Now that I think of it... a precision light sensor might be handy too as a poor man's sky quality meter, i.e. record ambient light levels as part of the log data. I've noticed that the sky can vary a lot between consecutive nights at a dark site, so this would be handy to record.