Ad Astra Observatory

I have been wanting more telemetry from the telescope and dome, so I’ve been planning to add “security” cameras in four places: one mounted piggyback on the scope, one mounted on the rear shutter, one pointing South, and one pointing East. Between these 4 views, I should be able to tell if the scope and dome are synched up, and generally where things are pointing.

I waited a long time to get around to this, because when you’re looking for these cameras and their related software, there is a lot of information and hardware that I’m not really interested in (I don’t need a motion sensor or a 100dB siren, for instance), and so there’s a lot of filtering that I have to do in order to dig into exactly what I want.

On a tip from a friend (thanks, D_!), I looked at D-Link’s WiFi enabled cameras, and landed on the DCS-934L, mostly because it was black, and because it was available via Amazon Prime.

The camera showed up, and was relatively easy to set up. I confused it a little, by doing its initial setup in the house, then moving it to the other subnet in the observatory, so I ended up pretty much redoing the setup. But, once I got it connected to the observatory WiFi, it was pretty easy — plug it in, set it in place, and voila! I now have a south-facing camera in the observatory. Woot!

South ended up being the easiest one to install, as there’s a wall outlet right there, and all 3 other locations will require me to hack the included power cable to use a USB plug (or build my own — it’s a standard “M” sized power jack on the camera). The shutter, in particular, will also require the use of a bridge rectifier (because its power leads get flip flopped to switch direction on the shutter) *and* a voltage regulator (to convert 12v->5v).

The shutter does provide a built-in mount point, though. There’s an “extra” bolt on the rear panel; it’s intended to be used to open the dome from the outside if the motor control board is out — I don’t need this option, as I can enter the dome “from below” far easier than climbing out onto the roof. Anyway, the bolt is a 1/4-20, which the camera can mount directly onto. Gotta love it.

The telescope will be a bit of a challenge; the camera’s base has an odd design; it’s not possible to mount in the center of the base, so I either have to hack the mount, or replace it, in order to center the camera on the scope. Now that I’m thinking about it, I could probably mount the camera to the polar scope cover; then I don’t need to move it when changing scopes. Hmm. Anyway, requires more thought.

The camera seems to be working well, so I ordered a couple more (it helped me get free one-day shipping for something else I was ordering), and then I can start chopping up USB cables. Again. 🙂