Watch the sky

Name what you can. Keep the oddities.

TwilightScan was made for that. A camera stays pointed up. From dusk to dawn it records what moves. In the morning there is a list: planes, satellites, meteors, and the lights that matched nothing.

Install the recorder See a night

Free for home use: no cost, no subscription. Runs in Docker on a Linux computer at your house, with an IP camera that speaks RTSP.

For a business, school or observatory, ask about a license.

The review desk, on a real night: 22–23 October

Sky map of one real night: purple satellite paths, short orange meteor streaks and dotted amber unidentified paths drawn over a stacked photo of the sky, with a checkbox and count for each type.
Every path of the night, in the camera's own view. A strobe is usually a plane. A short straight streak is a meteor candidate. A steady point may be a satellite. Here the 169 planes are switched off.
  • Oddities
  • Meteors
  • Satellites
Real star trails from one TwilightScan camera, circling Polaris, with plane strobes and satellites crossing.

Real footage

16 nights, 4,188 things that moved

One camera in October: 181 meteors, 878 satellites, 2,798 planes, and 169 it couldn't name. See the meteors, the plane strobes, and the odd ones.

See what it caught
Morning inbox on the review desk: the list of meteors by time, and a clip of one meteor with its path drawn as an orange line.
The morning list, grouped by type. This clip is a meteor at 00:25, with the path the desk found drawn on it.
Timeline of one real night, events stacked every fifteen minutes from dusk to dawn, busy with satellites after dusk and before dawn.
The whole night, quarter-hour by quarter-hour. Satellites crowd the hours after dusk and before dawn.

Observe, then identify

The night is the record. A name is a bonus when the light behaves like something known.

Observe

The camera looks up all night. You open one page in the morning and see what crossed, when, and for how long.

Identify

The desk sorts by how the light behaves: strobes, a straight trail, a smooth point. A catalogue name comes when the camera is calibrated. The clip is there either way.

Oddities

Unidentified means nothing matched. Those stay at the top. You watch the clip and keep it, call it noise, or mark the sort as wrong.

Three weeks of real nights as stacked bars by type, and a table of each night's hours recorded, counts and glitches filtered.
Night after night. Frame-wide glitches, like wind and cloud, are counted but kept out of the list.

At the house

A camera pointed up, and a computer running the recorder. The video stays there. The camera password stays there.

In the morning

An inbox, a sky chart, and a history. Help on that desk files a ticket here if a night looks wrong.

On this site

How it works, install, the camera settings that already worked for one roof, a sample map of stations, and a way to write to us.

A light you cannot place

Write from here, or from Help on the review desk. Tell us the night and what the clip showed.

We typically answer within a day or two
The camera password stays on the house machine