Linux is great!
More years now we have been running various cameras pointed up at the sky, hoping for pretty pictures of clouds but more importantly, pretty pictures of meteors and fireballs. Robert Nemiroff was kind enough to assist with some better hardware that we have been attempting to commission for well over a year now an SBIG ST237A camera. There was some custom linux software that was meant to aid in annotating the images we took but we have never been able to get that to work.
At a minimum we wanted to get a date/time stamp actually right on the image.
Luckily today was a very slow Saturday with not too many things on the go (ok, besides taking down the fall outdoor decorations, putting up wreaths, christmas inflatables, more wreaths, christmas lights on the roof, decorating trees, and a bunch of other stuff at -10 deg C with a cold north wind). An actual hour of research with google and playing with the ImageMagick package installed on our file server… success!
Below is a manual sample of what each of the 200 odd images generated each night by the Allskycamera/concam setup.
The next big R&D job is to create a folder based on the date and move the 200 odd images into that folder, and then upload the whole thing to the web site each morning.