Cameras to capture day/night cloud condition

ahaque286

Hello! I know most people here are interested in capturing clear night sky. But I am hoping to get some suggestions with the goal of recording cloud conditions. In the past I used a ZWO camera (don't recall the model) for this. But during the day, sun glare really ruined the image quality even at the lowest possible exposure time (see attached). In the night, there seemed to be a lot of noise. Can someone suggest me a model that can deal with these issues? Thanks in advance

w7ay

ahaque286 But during the day, sun glare really ruined the image quality even at the lowest possible exposure time (see attached). In the night, there seemed to be a lot of noise.

There is not much you can do about overexposure when pointed directly at the Sun in the day time, unless you have a mechanism to place a very heavy neutral density filter in front of the lens.

For nighttime, ditch that cheap free lens that comes with your camera. I use a Samyang 8mm F2.8 UMC Fisheye II for the Sony-E mount, together with an ASI294MC to get these with 4 second exposure and gain of 390.:

Program is my own, written on top of INDIGO, with INDIGO Sky running in a Raspberry Pi 4 (the black box in the foreground in the picture below). Power and data are through Ethernet PoE.

Except for the Sun itself, you can get decent color of the foilage in the daytime with proper histogramming (notice exposure of 0.0033 seconds, and a gain of 1:

Chen