Starhouse Observatory

Daily AuroraCam as Movie

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Verified Aurora

The movies below with specified dates and times have verified aurora visible:

November 3, 2021 beginning at about 1:30 am on 11/4/2021 and intermittently until about 5 am
July 22, 2022 beginning at about midnight on 07/22/2022 and lasts until about 2:30 am
October 13, 2022 beginning at about 1:45 am on 10/14/2022 and lasts until daylight
March 22, 2023 beginning at about 2:30 am on March 23, 2023 and lasts until daylight.
March 23, 2023 beginning at dusk and lasts until about 10 pm when cloud cover hides the aurora.
July 25, 2023 beginning at dusk and lasts until about dawn with an especially good show a little after 3am.
August 12, 2023 beginning at 1 am for only about half an hour. Very faint on the camera--I doubt this one was visible with the unaided eye.
September 17, 2023 beginning at 2023-09-16 at 11 pm with minor and intermittent activity up to 2:30am when it got stronger and then at 2:50am through 3:30am with a great display.
September 19, 2023 beginning at twilight and lasting until dawn but only visible through breaks in the clouds.
September 20, 2023 beginning at 3:00am and lasting until 4:30am.
December 13, 2023 beginning at 7pm and lasting until 5am. Includes plenty of Geminids meteors!
December 15, 2023 beginning at 10:30pm and intermittent until 1:30am on Dec 16. Very faint--probably not very visible to the unaided eye.
March 19, 2024 beginning at 00:25am and lasting only 11 minutes.
March 31, 2024 beginning at 11:45pm and lasting until April 1 at 2am.
April 15, 2024 beginning around 10:30pm and lasting until dawn. Bright enough to be seen through cloud cover and by 5am really wild.

Other Sightings

November 20, 2022 15 second movie with a really good fireball at 4:11am MST. Full movie
November 20, 2022 10 second movie from the raw jpgs of the same event at 4:11am MST.
Fireball--August 23, 2023 at 10:33 pm 14 second movie.
Unusual life form detected--October 5, 2023 at 5:10am 2 minute movie. Watch the middle of the screen at the very bottom.
Fireball--November 18, 2023 at 2:21am a 49 second movie--watch the upper right corner of the frame.
The same fireball from the East facing camera a 33 second movie--watch the left center of the frame.
Fireball--November 20, 2023 at 2:21am, almost exactly 48 hours after the fireball on November 18. A 32 second movie--watch the upper left corner of the frame.
Two fireballs in one night! The first at 9:39pm on November 20, 2023, the second at 2:55am on November 21, 2023, a 12 second movie for both.
Non-explosive fireball., a 13 second movie.
Smoke? Fire? Multiple explosions? Watch the lower left of the screen, a 50 second movie.
Another non-explosive fireball February 8,2024 at 1:45 am., a 4 second movie.
Fireball--February 11, 2024 at 12:45 am., an 8 second movie.
A dandy, explosive fireball--March 16, 2024 at 11:23 pm., a 13 second movie.
An explosive fireball--March 19, 2024 at 4:36 am., a 5 second movie.
April 14, 2024 at 1:34 am., a 7 second movie.
April 16, 2024 at 4:07 am., a 9 second movie.

Very much a work in progress yet...

I've built an aurora cam using a 4K Spinel camera which is built around a Sony IMX415 sensor.

Spinel UC80MPD

I installed the camera itself in a halogen security light enclosure--plenty of room after removing the halogen light fixture. That is mounted on an electrical junction box.

Inside the electrical junction box is an Odroid XU4 running Ubuntu 20.04 and a python3 script I wrote to capture images at roughly 3 per minute beginning at nautical twilight in the evening and ending at nautical twilight the next morning.

After image capture all the images (roughly 1200 jpgs per night) are put together into a timelapse movie using ffmpeg.

The mp4 movie is then uploaded to the StarHouse Observatory web site and is available for viewing below.

Currently the images are obtained using the Video4Linux software with additional processing by the OpenCV-python libraries. v4l2-ctl is used to bump the gain to 175 and to set the exposure to manual and the maximum exposure time. Instead of seconds exposed it is in units with the maximum to be 10000. I believe this roughly translates to about 1/3 of a second--not really enough to capture very many stars in the North. Casseopeia is readily recognizable in the early evening and the Big Dipper is well into the frame before the end of the run at dawn.

The main core of the python script is to capture as many frames as possible in just below the amount of time it takes to make the stars oblong streaks instead of points. Experientally it seems that 15 captures in roughly 10 seconds is a good amount for this camera. The script captures each "frame" into an array in memory so we don't wait for writing the frames to disk.

After capturing, we loop over the images, "adding" one array on top of the other. Once all the frames have been added together cv.multiply is used to "boost" the values in the summed array. This brings out the fainter stars. Finally, and values less than 40 in the array are set to 0 to remove any artifacts and a lot of noise.

The final result captures enough stars to make the constellations around the pole distinctly visible.

Once we capture an actual aurora ;-) I'll add in logic to detect the distinctive green of our normal auroras and if that is found send an SMS message out to anyone who wants. More on this as work progresses.

Here's the code for python afacinados ;-)