You can capture all sorts of interesting night time sky events with a camera, everything from planes, stars and maybe the odd shooting star

The aim of this tutorial is to setup the Raspberry PI (rPI) NoIR camera to take a photo every 12 seconds over 9 hours. The NoIR camera doesn’t have the Infra-red filter so is well suited to taking images of the sky at night.

You can use a normal Raspberry PI or the rPI Zero, both work equally well. You will need an external battery pack to power the PI. I have linked to one below. The advantage of the battery model I have is that I can run two cameras from the same battery and more importantly it will last for more than 9 hours.

This tutorial doesn’t go into the steps of setting up the rPI with raspbian as there are plenty of tutorials that explain how to do this already. It also assumes you have a headless rPI setup as all commands I have executed via SSH. There are some good tutorials on setting up a headless.

Some videos created can be found here: https://vimeo.com/user112616269

Requirements

Time to complete: 120 minutes

Contents

  1. Weatherproof the RaspberryPI
  2. Create a script for the timelapse
  3. Make the script execultable
  4. Auto start the script on boot
  5. Position the camera
  6. Next morning...
  7. Create the timelapse video

1. Weatherproof the RaspberryPI

Cut a hole in the side of the tupperware box large enough to fit the lens of the picamera through, blutak the camera in place

Weatherproof the RaspberryPI - Scrape People also ask

2. Create a script for the timelapse

Create a the file /home/pi/camera/camera.sh and add the contents as follows:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/raspistill -vf -hf -w 1920 -h 1080 -ISO 800 -ss 6000000 -br 80 -co 100 -t 18000000 -tl 50000 -o /home/pi/camera/image%08d.jpg

-tl time between shots in milliseconds

-t how long to do this for in milliseconds, e.g. 32400000 = 9 hours

-ss shutter speed in microseconds, 6000000 = 6 seconds

3. Make the script execultable

sudo chmod u+x /home/pi/camera/camera.sh

 

4. Auto start the script on boot

Edit /etc/rc.local to autostart the script on boot

#!/bin/sh -e

/home/pi/camera/camera.sh & exit 0

5. Position the camera

Connect it all up and place outside at night

6. Next morning...

In the morning, put the SD card into another PC and move the jpg files from /home/pi/camera/ to a local directory

7. Create the timelapse video

Enter the directory on your PC and run the following command

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf fps=15:type=jpeg -noskip -of lavf -lavfopts format=mov -ovc lavc -lavcopts vglobal=1:coder=0:vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=5000 -vf eq2=1.2:0.9:0.0:1.0,scale=1280:-2 -o lapse.avi

Create the timelapse video - Scrape People also ask