If you remember a few days ago, I reused e-waste to install a network camera in a tree facing our lake, so my wife who can’t go out easily can watch the birds and the nature.
And early this morning, she saw this.
This camera is fabulous: it’s so sensitive in the dark, it captured the northern lights in vibrant colors! That really made her day and mine.
What camera is it? I’m looking at setting something like this up at my mountain house for star gazing.
It’s one of these: MileSight AI Pro 5M 23x PTZ PoE+ bullet camera (exact model number MS-C5367-X23PE).
I chose the one with the 23x zoom because it lets us see more things further around the lake. But if you want one for stargazing, maybe you’d be better served with the 4 megapixel 16x zoom model (MS-C4467-X20RPE): the page says it only needs a minimum 0.002 lux at F1.6, while ours needs 0.008 lux at the same stops. I find ours’ performances in low-light conditions quite stunning, so the 4M model should be even better.
It’s not a cheap camera, but it’s really worth the money. The fabulous web interface alone makes it worth it: it’s actually useful, pleasant to use, it lets you define users with different rights, it doesn’t depend on some stupid proprietary Windows software, and it’s fully compatible with Firefox as well as Chromium. And of course it’s ONVIF-compatible and it outputs streams the usual way (RTSP and such) so you can connect it to anything that’s ONVIF- and RTSP-compatible.