Patrick Welti
Mankato State University
Patrick Welti and Roger Smith
We put together a sky camera which, when used on moonless nights, will be helpful in detecting the presence of thin clouds and/or high cirrus. The camera consists of three parts: an image intensifier, a video camera, and a protection circuit. The protection circuit prevents the phosphor screen in the image intensifier from being damaged by excessive light. The video signal is converted into a digital image using a frame grabber card in a Windows PC. The camera images are fed into a pipeline system which takes many images, averages them, and then writes them out into a format ready to be included into a self-updating web page. When the system is completely finished, astronomers will be able to bring up this web page and have a automatically updated image of the sky outside.