Day and Night Clouds Detection Using a Thermal-Infrared All-Sky-View Camera

A Radiometric All-Sky Infrared Camera (RASICAM) for DES/CTIO

A novel radiometric all-sky infrared camera [RASICAM] has been constructed to allow automated real-time quantitative assessment of night sky conditions for the Dark Energy Camera [DECam] located on the Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The camera is optimized to detect the position, motion and optical depth of thin, high (8-10km) cirrus clouds and contrai...

Detection of Himalayan thar using a thermal infrared camera

The thermal characteristics of thar and their alpine habitat (including expanses of bare rock) were determined as a function of time throughout the night, by measurements from imagery acquired with a thermal video camera. Measurements were also made on thar in a farm environment, to determine the radiant temperature difference between their considerably hotter heads and cooler bodies. Thermal i...

All day, and all of the night.

The MMT All-Sky Camera

The MMT all-sky camera is a low-cost, wide-angle imaging system that takes images of the sky every 10 seconds, day and night. It is based on an Adirondack Video Astronomy StellaCam II video camera and utilizes an auto-iris fisheye lens to allow safe operation under all lighting conditions, even direct sunlight. This combined with the antiblooming characteristics of the StellaCam's detector allo...

All-sky Relative Opacity Mapping Using Night Time Panoramic Images

An all-sky cloud monitoring system that generates relative opacity maps over many of the world’s premier astronomical observatories is described. Photometric measurements of numerous background stars are combined with simultaneous sky brightness measurements to differentiate thin clouds from sky glow sources such as air glow and zodiacal light. The system takes a continuous pipeline of all-sky ...