The allsky camera system, as it stands, is now completely automated. We had success last night with the mouse scripts where before something was always going wrong.
A typical night runs something like this:
20:00 local time: workstation and ccd control box powers up from a mechanical timer.
21:50 (01:50 UT): Ghost Mouse script starts up to connect to the camera, and then click on take images. We are set on 120 second exposures as a compromise for now.
Every half hour an image is taken out of the stream of images, processed and uploaded to the web site.
04:15 (08:15 UT):
The number of exposures runs on past the end of the night, when the exposures get too bright . Prior to that, the endofnight script runs and pulls out all of the nights run into another area and starts processing them from fits to jpg while annotating them.
04:30 the allsky workstation shuts itself down with a software command.
05:00 the mechanical timer shuts down the workstation and ccd control box power.
06:45 local: the nights run of jpg’s and an animated gif file are uploaded.