Sky Camera

I'm lucky enough to live in a rural location in Scotland where I have a good view of the sky and in particular of the northern horizon.

While the view has a bit of light pollution at night time, I do have wide view of the sky and I have been able to photograph the Aurora, Noctilucent clouds and the moon. You can see some of the photo's on my Bridge Photography page. 

However some of the things that are in the night sky happen when your asleep and it's one thing to take a photo and a whole other to get some video, so I thought about getting a Sky Camera. There are lots of purpose built sky cameras out there, but they can be expensive and as this was just to see what I could capture I looked at a basic CCTV camera to see what it could capture.

After a small amount of research I stumbled across Tapo CCTV cameras and in particular the Tapo C325WB** (see note below). It's a standard CCTV camera however it's main selling point was that it said it would give "true colour night vision". Obviously I was sceptical 🤔.

For a stand alone CCTV it wasn't that expensive - around £80 from the Tapo store and it had some very good standard CCTV functions. Obviously high quality video (with sound), spotlights, alerts on your phone, an alarm function and two way audio. It needs mains power but it could connect to your network using Ethernet or WiFi. The video can be stored locally on an SD Card inside the camera (you need to buy one), on a NAS storage device, or out in the cloud using Tapo's paid for Cloud service. I chose the SD card option as it was the simplest and most cost effective option.

Unboxing and setting up was simple enough - the camera talks to you and tells you what to do to set it up!!!! 10 minutes after unboxing it was active and recording. I mounted it on the side of my shed and pointed it north. After a bit of experimentation and some internet searches I found there were a couple of things that I need to set on the camera to get the best images (all done on the Tapo App)

1. Video Quality - set to the highest setting  - "2K QHD"2

2. Night Mode - set to "Spotlights off" - see note below

3. HDR - set to "Off"

4. Recording Schedule - set to "Continuous Recording" (to do this you have to mark every cell  on a 7 day, 24 hour matrix)

5. I also turned off all alerts so the camera doesn't give messages for any detections. It still captures them, but saves you being "ping'd" on your phone all the time. After all this is being used as a sky camera not a CCTV camera.

Note:  Your best to use the Night Mode set to "Spotlights off" as the "Full Colour mode" uses the spotlights. I you do try "Full Colour Mode" cover the spotlights on the camera with black tape. This is necessary as without the tape, bugs are attracted to the camera and fly in front of it ruining the image.

Next: Were the results worth it?

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