If you haven’t checked out the live allsky camera on my website, you have missed out on some of the cool features that the software provides. In addition to live images being displayed at all times of day, it also processes data from each night to create three different ways to view the heavens. Each night, it saves every image from dusk to dawn and combines them in one of three ways. All of these features are available in the left hand menu of the allsky page and will show archived data from every night.
Timelapse
First, the software creates a video with each frame, which can be quite interesting and dramatic on the cloudy nights.
Keogram
A very useful feature, keograms are a combination of the center column of pixels from every image of a night. The time is labeled along the bottom as the night goes on from left to right. These succinctly report clear and cloudy skies, moon and planet transits, and the times of astronomical dusk. So when I wake up in the morning and wonder why the last three hours of data is terrible, I can look to see that thin clouds filled the sky.
Star Trails
The final image, which can be the most striking, is a maximum of every image throughout the night. These really show how the revolution of the Earth makes the heavens spin about the celestial pole. It takes a very good, completely clear, dewless night to get a good star trail. But they are marvelous when they work!
