during my master’s i assisted in testing a Small Imaging Telescope (SIT) prototype at the TAIGA observatory. one of my tasks was to hook a small ZWO astocamera to an experiment’s computer and make a user-friendly web interface to quickly view:
- image feed from the camera to assess observation conditions (clouds, sun, moon, zodiac lights, etc)
- data from onboard sensors such as temperature and humidity
i wanted to use python for web stuff and the tricky part was connecting to the camera’s driver. this led
to the creation of pyindigo. the rest was much easier, but i learned a lot about
web tech in the process. and here’s the frontend i built (for some reason with react, don’t ask!):
there was an idea to use this camera’s images for precise star tracking to figure out atmospheric extinction. that data could then be used to reconstruct atmospheric conditions for $\gamma$-ray signal reconstruction. unfortunately, as far as i know, this never came to be!