Author name: Mark Haworth

A few months ago, I decided to utilise and old webcam and an unused PC with the idea to re-create (on the cheap of course) something similar to what can be bought for several hundred pounds to “capture” images of the night sky automatically.

So, Ubuntu was loaded, the wonderfully flexible “motion” application was installed along with the webcam driver, and that was that. http://webcam.willowhey.net was born. What soon became apparent, was that it wan’t that good at seeing stars, a far more superior webcam would be required for that, so instead, I simply used it for monitoring the weather. 

The set up captures snapshots every five minutes, creates hourly timelapse videos and record images and mpegs when something within the frame appears to move. All this comes as standard with the motion package.

Following the recent news item of a spectacular metor, or as it was later confirmed, the break up of some space junk, I was tempted to have a look what, if anything, my webcam had caught. The answer can be seen in this video that I uploaded to YouTube :-

http://youtu.be/VpkITqYIVyE The action is towards the end.

Needless to say I was delighted with the results! 

M.