Docs · Install · Camera · First night · Using the desk
How it works
Point a camera at the sky. Leave a computer on the same network. In the morning, open the list of what moved.
The video and the camera password stay on that computer. This site is the manual and the place to write for help.
The night
- A fixed camera stays powered and pointed up. Power over Ethernet is the setup that has already recorded nights.
- You put the camera's address in one file on the computer. Install covers Docker, a Linux service, and Windows.
- From civil dusk to civil dawn the computer pulls the camera's video stream and writes ten-minute segments. The folder for the night is the evening's date.
- A quick pass marks movers while the night is still going. A full-resolution pass runs in the morning.
- You open the review desk. The list is planes, satellites, meteor candidates, and lights that matched nothing. First night is the aiming and the password.
Stars and satellites are one or two pixels, so the recording stays at the camera's full main stream. The camera page is the night profile that already worked.
Who this is for
- Someone who already has a PoE camera and a computer that can stay on. That is the path recording today.
- A low-voltage job that already pulls Ethernet to a roof. The same camera and the same cable.
- A plane or satellite watcher who wants the clip and the time, and will look at the odd lights in the morning.
- A household that will leave a camera pointed up and open one page with coffee.
A small box on the roof comes later. A Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB is the computer in the station parts list, and a still camera is a second way to feed the same morning list. Both are below. The image you can install today is linux/amd64.
Cameras
The camera has to hold a night profile, not a security-camera default.
- Fixed to the roof or a pole, powered all night. PoE.
- A manual shutter around 1/5 second, so the sensor is exposing almost the whole time. A meteor is one line. A strobe is a bead.
- Gain that stays at one number, so one night can be compared with the next.
- The infrared lamp off. It lights insects at the lens and washes the stars out.
- H.264 on the main stream, with smart codecs off. Those codecs throw away the quiet sky, which is where the faint movers are.
- An RTSP address the computer can open on the local network.
- The clock set from NTP. Matching a light later needs the time to the second.
The camera that has recorded this way is an Amcrest IP5M-T1179EB, 5 megapixel, at 3072 × 2048 and 5 frames per second. Amcrest speaks the Dahua settings pages, so the review desk can read the shutter, gain, and bitrate back. A used turret or bullet from the same family can work when it can hold that profile.
Leave a doorbell, a battery camera, and a phone in a window off this job. They sleep, they force a short shutter, or they will not turn the infrared lamp off. A camera whose web page resets the bitrate on save needs a second look: the desk shows the rate you set beside the rate the file is actually using.
What the desk shows about the picture
The camera page on the review desk puts a live frame on screen, then four lines under it. You type the camera's name and brand. The rest is read back.
| Line | What it answers | The roof that already records |
|---|---|---|
| Stream | How big the picture is, the codec, and the frame rate. | 3072 × 2048 · H.264 · 5 fps |
| Bitrate | Megabits per second in the segment being written, beside the rate the camera is set to. | set 6.1 Mb/s |
| Night exposure | Shutter, gain, and 3D noise reduction on the night profile. | 1/5 s · gain 50 · 3D NR auto |
| Camera clock | In sync, or how many seconds the camera has drifted from the computer. | NTP on |
The third column is the target profile, not a live reading from this website. On a Dahua-style camera the desk fills the stream line and the exposure line from the camera itself. On a plain RTSP camera the desk shows the megabits the open segment is using. Picture size, codec, frame rate, shutter, and gain stay blank until that brand has a reader. The segment file already carries picture size, codec, and frame rate, so a later reading can fill the stream line for any camera that speaks RTSP.
The same reading already counts segments closed and segments the detector has finished. That pair is the next line on the card, so a stalled night is visible before morning. A station page on this site, once stations are real, would keep the short version next to a trail: model, picture size, shutter, gain. The camera's address and password stay at the house.
Still frames
A still-frame mode is the next ingest. The recorder today takes one continuous video stream, because the sensor has to be open almost all the time for a meteor to be one line.
A still mode would watch a folder of frames instead of an RTSP address. That fits three cameras people already own:
- A DSLR or mirrorless body on an intervalometer, one exposure every second or so.
- An astro camera, such as a ZWO ASI or a Player One, writing a frame on a timer.
- A Raspberry Pi HQ camera, or a STARVIS board on the Pi's camera port, taking one exposure at a time.
Each frame brings its own line for the card: model from the file, exposure length, gain or ISO, the gap until the next frame, pixel size, and the time written on the frame. The morning list would still be the same kinds of lights. There is no switch for this in the current recorder.
A Raspberry Pi
People mean two different machines when they say Raspberry Pi.
The computer next to a PoE camera. The camera stays the turret on the roof. The Pi runs TwilightScan and pulls RTSP across the LAN. The station parts list uses a Pi 5 with 8 GB. The install page asks for 8 GB on a PC, and the container cap is 2.5 GB, so a 4 GB Pi is tight on the morning full-resolution pass. The image published for install is linux/amd64. A Pi waits on an arm64 build of that same image. Until then, use a small amd64 Linux box, the Linux service, or Windows.
The camera on the Pi's own port. A HQ module or a STARVIS board on CSI or USB is the still-frame path above, and the sensor in the weatherproof station sketch: a dome, a dew heater, and PoE+ if the whole box lives outside. That sketch is a shopping list. It is not a camera the recorder opens today.
Support
Write from Support, or from Help on the review desk. The desk sends the symptom, the recorder version, the camera's health and the end of the night's recorder log. The camera password, its address and your location are removed from it first. An account on this site is free. It keeps the support thread, and later the roof you register. Sign in explains both.