Night Sky Pi
Automated overnight sky capture for Raspberry Pi cameras.
Problem
Night-sky capture is easy to miss when it depends on manual setup. I wanted a Raspberry Pi camera rig that could start at sunset, capture through the night, record useful metadata, and package the results without needing someone to babysit it.
Approach
Night Sky Pi is a Python application intended for Raspberry Pi hardware, originally targeting the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and Raspberry Pi HQ Camera. It calculates the observation window from location data, captures images from sunset to sunrise, writes JSON sidecar data, packages each observation, and can publish MQTT events as the run progresses.
MQTT is optional for the core capture loop, but it gives companion modules a way to react to observation starts, image captures, completion, archive creation, and cleanup.
Result
The project reached a packaged, service-oriented shape that could be installed with pip, run under systemd, and extended with supporting modules. It is now archived, but it remains the foundation for several later automation and astronomy notes.