Palomar All-Sky Movie: Sept 10 - 14, 2010

Here is a short video covering ~116 hours of night and day from the new Palomar Observatory all-sky camera:

Here is a direct link to the video on YouTube.

Notice at night in the upper and lower right it never gets completely dark. This is light pollution, aka sky glow, from city lights.

As you can see in the daytime, the sun completely saturates the camera's CCD detector causing it to heavily bleed out on to other parts of the image. In spite of this, the camera is still a good daytime cloud detector (when we have clouds).

The camera is not yet up for the public, but that will be coming soon.

Giant Owls from Space Invade Palomar?

It only took about 5 days for an owl to decide that our new AllOwl-Sky Camera makes for a pretty good perch. Sigh.

The photo above is a 151 second exposure taken the night of the 14th. The owl didn't even have the good graces to hold still during the exposure so there are multiple images of the talons.

It seems that Palomar is not the first to have this kind of problem. Unfortunately our owl has been back and left "calling cards" on the glass dome of the camera. We need to both clean the lens and discourage the owl from perching there (or give it a place that is even better). Does anybody have any good ideas about that?

Look tomorrow for a short video of from the all-sky covering about 4 nights & days taken before the owl came to visit.

Last Night from our New All-Sky Camera

Here is how last night looked from our new all-sky camera:

If you look closely (you may need to watch it more than once) you can spot the dome of the Hale Telescope in the upper right - near the edge of trees. Here is a direct link to it on YouTube.

Preview: Palomar's New All-Sky Camera

Here is a preview shot from Palomar Observatory's new all-sky camera. This photo was taken last night right at moonrise. Our all-sky camera is not yet perfectly focused or installed in its final spot (It will be on the pole in the photo), but in this shot it did capture the Milky Way and a meteor.


I will announce it here when the camera is up and running. From time to time I'll post interesting images or movies as they come in.