ZWO ASI676MC Pro — Sony IMX676 sensor, 26MP color, USB 3.0. Excellent sensitivity for night sky imaging.

180° fisheye lens included with the ASI676MC. Covers the full sky hemisphere in a single frame.

Optical-grade polycarbonate hemispheric dome — clear, scratch-resistant, UV-stable. Available on Amazon. Choose one sized to fit your enclosure opening.

WH-18 Hinged Junction Box — waterproof, hinged lid for easy access. Available on Amazon. IP-rated and roomy enough for the Pi, relays, buck converter, and wiring.

2x fans inside the enclosure for active ventilation on hot days, controlled automatically via relay based on BME280 temperature/humidity readings.

12V weatherproof power brick feeds into power tails (positive and negative distribution). A 5V buck converter taps off the 12V rail to power the Raspberry Pi and relay board. Fans and dew heater run directly on 12V.

Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) running Raspberry Pi OS and indi-allsky.

M.2 NVMe SSD via USB adapter on the Pi — used for the OS, indi-allsky data, and extra swap space needed for timelapse generation. Images sync automatically to a Synology NAS with auto-purging of data older than 30 days.

Custom bracket using hose straps, an L-bracket, aluminum bar, and metal plates bolted to a porch column. The camera extends out on an arm to get clear sky coverage away from the roof overhang.

indi-allsky runs on rho-skylab and captures frames continuously, saving full-resolution images to local storage organized by date and period (day/night). It also generates a realtime keogram and timelapse videos automatically.

A cron job runs every 2 minutes on rho-skylab, executing gen_manifest.sh. This script scans the last 3 days of images and generates a manifest.json and timelapse_manifest.json — JSON index files that tell this webpage which images and videos are available.

Every 2 minutes, rsync pushes new images from rho-skylab to the DMZ web server over an SSH tunnel using a dedicated key pair. Bandwidth is capped at 900 KB/s to avoid saturating the home network. A separate cron updates status.json every minute so the live status indicator stays current.

The web server lives in a pfSense DMZ — a separate network segment isolated from the home LAN. The firewall blocks all inbound connections from the DMZ to the LAN, so even if the web server were compromised, it cannot reach any home devices. rho-skylab initiates all connections outbound, so no firewall holes are needed inward.

nginx runs on an Ubuntu server in the DMZ, serving this static HTML page and the synced images. HTTPS is handled by a Let's Encrypt certificate via Certbot, which auto-renews every 90 days. Port forwarding on pfSense routes public traffic on ports 80 and 443 to the nginx box.

A single index.html file with no external dependencies. The Live tab auto-refreshes the latest image every 30 seconds. The Gallery tab reads the manifest and lets you browse the last 3 days of images with day/night filtering and hour-by-hour sorting — the filter dropdown only shows time ranges that actually have images available (e.g. "Today" won't appear before sunrise). You can favorite images for quick access later, with a toast notification confirming each one. On mobile, pull down at the top of the page to manually refresh the current tab. The status indicator checks status.json and the image age every 60 seconds to show whether rho-skylab is online.