InfinitySky: Your All-Sky-Camera Project

Hello, Star Gazers, Cloud Watchers, and Tech Wizards! 🌟☁️💻

Welcome to InfinitySky, where we bring the celestial dome to your homes with ease, precision, and an eye for beauty. Our project is your digital window to the cosmos, capturing the drama of clouds, the ballet of celestial bodies, and the thrill of meteor showers. InfinitySky isn't just another camera project; it's your ticket to ride across the universe while sipping coffee in your living room.

Please note: This project is in early alpha and work in progress. Breaking changes are possible on every commit. We're actively working on reaching beta state until the end of the year, so that the next year can be completely captured by InfinitySky.

Features 📸🌌

With InfinitySky, you are not just stuck with the current view of the sky; you're documenting a celestial journey:

• Automated Archiving: InfinitySky is an ever-watchful eye on the sky, snapping a photo every five minutes, automatically archiving and processing it. You won't miss a thing!
• Raspberry Pi 3/4 Support: Optimized for Raspberry Pi 3/4, and currently compatible with Raspberry Pi Cameras V2/V3. We are continually expanding to support all libcamera-enabled cameras and USB ones, like ZWO. Because we love choices!
• Intelligent Exposures: We know the golden hour from the blue hour. Our system smartly adjusts exposures and measurements depending on the time of day.
• Keogram Creation: Ever wondered how the sky looked the entire night or day? Keogram to the rescue! Get the entire celestial movement stitched into one image.
• Daily Timelapse Creation: Watch the sky in fast-forward. Review how the day unfolded or how stars traveled in a neat, compact timelapse video.

Plus, we have an impressive line of features in the works:

• Web UI: A compelling, user-friendly web UI is currently under development. It'll let you adjust settings, view captured media, and customize your InfinitySky experience.
• Community Sharing: We're looking to build a feature that will allow you to share your best celestial captures with a community of fellow astronomy enthusiasts.
• Weather Predictions: With enough data, we could even predict weather patterns. Imagine planning your stargazing nights better!
• And a lot more!

InfinitySky is more than a sky camera; it's your personal observatory and a great addition to your weather station or astronomy data center, wrapped in one sleek package. It's not just for the lovers of space and weather; it's for teachers, researchers, photographers, and technologists who'd like a reliable, smart window to the sky.

Stay tuned for the upcoming features and improvements. We will update this readme regularly because the sky is not the limit for us! 🚀

We hope you're as excited as we are about this project. Whether you're an amateur stargazer or a seasoned astronomer, InfinitySky promises a sky-gazing experience like never before. So hop on, and let's traverse the universe from our backyard.

Installation Guide 👩‍💻

Welcome aboard the InfinitySky journey! Follow the steps below to install and configure your all sky camera project:

Step 1: Prepare Your Environment

Ensure you have a Raspberry Pi OS Lite or a minimal Debian OS installed. We're working on supporting all major linux platforms soon.

Currently, this is only tested on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with OS Lite, based on Debian 11 bullseye.

Missing packages will be installed automatically in the installation script.

Software requirements:

• Python 3.9 or higher
• PHP 8.2, with extensions:
  • cli
  • fpm
  • gd
  • imagick
  • opcache
  • mbstring
  • xml
• libcamera
• web server, ideally nginx
• ffmpeg
• imagemagick
• composer

If you are using Raspberry OS Lite, libcamera and python should be installed already.

Additionally, these python packages are required and need to be installed via pip:

• astral
• pytz

Step 2: Clone the Repository

Clone the InfinitySky repository to the /opt/infinitysky directory:

# First create the destination dir
sudo mkdir /opt/infinitysky 

# Then add permission to your current user for installation, adjust user and group
sudo chown user:group /opt/infinitysky

# Then clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/neoground/InfinitySky.git /opt/infinitysky

Step 3: Run installation script

Run the installation script:

chmod +x /opt/infinitysky/install.sh
/opt/infinitysky/install.sh

Step 4: Add to nginx

Add the nginx config of InfinitySky to your main nginx config (typically in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled):

server {
   ...
   include /opt/infinitysky/nginx.conf;
}

The config expects the php-fpm socket to be available at /run/php/php-fpm.sock, which should be the case with default configuration. If you have a custom setup, feel free to copy the /opt/infinitysky/nginx.conf, link the nginx config to this copy and adjust the values as needed.

Step 5: Configure InfinitySky

You can find the full default configuration at config/main.json. Create a file config/user.json with the same structure to override single options.

vim /opt/infinitysky/config/user.json

Step 6: Visit InfinitySky

Finally, open your favorite web browser and visit the InfinitySky dashboard using the Raspberry Pi's IP address or hostname, followed by /infinitysky. For example, if your Raspberry Pi's IP address is 192.168.1.10, you would navigate to http://192.168.1.10/infinitysky.

And voilà! You have successfully set up InfinitySky. Enjoy your celestial explorations! 🌌

Remember to check back regularly for updates and new features, as we're constantly working to improve InfinitySky. Safe travels through the cosmos!