Why bother with a camera?. The boltwood or another Italian cheapy I can't remember monitors conditions and automatically alarms or shuts an OBS automatically.
Fred, you are taking about the aag cloud watcher. I have one of those as well. But it's nice to know what the sky is doing from horizon to horizon. The aag has a trigger for shutting an obs roof under specific circumstances.
I fleetingly used an ALLSky 340 with a Bluetooth to RS232 link to the PC, My only gripe was image downloads were a little slow. The upside was you can set up the camera remotely on a roof (no cables) with a solar panel & 12Volt battery.
The Fujinon lens SBIG use is superb, with the image quality being significtantly better that less expensive units (a quick check of various websites should confirm this).
I also have a Boltwood II, and while its good, it does not always accurately indicate the presence (or not) of cloud and has been known to close my dome despite it being clear.
The Sbig allsky camera seems to give better views than some of others i have seen.
I like the idea of "seeing" the sky and sky conditions rather than the boltwood graphs. The sky cameras also allows for bit of fun with meteor watching.
Hey Brendan,
The Moonglow is the one I have been looking and I think would be ideal, if you are thinking of ordering one maybe we should do so together and save on shipping ask for a discount for 2 from OPT you never know... All up will be under the GST charge. We would need the 240v pal version which is listed at $419
If you are going this way give me a call.
Peter
I will post something soon on a camera I just finished building. Got the idea from a couple of guys at the AIC last November. I used my qhy5 (not needed anymore as I am guiding with the st11k) but if you have an old DSI or similar it will work just as well. I cAn also provide software from the Californian guys that uses Maxim to control the camera and either save and overwrite each image for web page updating etc or can save images (jpgs) sequentially to string together to make videos of say meteor showers - images aren't high photographic quality but are great for cloud detection (similar to the other all sky cameras I've seen). All up (apart from the qhy) it cost me $29. I am time and date stamping with Now() outside the image when I load or refresh it each 5 minutes.
I am testing it at Leyburn this weekend and will post some results next week - first uncalibrated shots look great (of clouds) but I'm hoping for some clear shots tonight.
I haven't worked on lightning protection yet but will probably come up with something over the next few weeks