Ethernet/USB/Wifi? and Advice on a new project

[ocpaul20 0]

Hi,

Hopefully this is the correct place for this.

 

I am thinking about a project to photograph the night sky to capture moving things - like satellites or anything else out there (UFOs, meteors, etc.)

 

I really only need to capture a trail to show where 'it' goes and whether it changes abrupt direction, so as far as I can tell at the moment I do not need a telescope attached and a fairly standard camera module + 60 degree lens would probably do. The idea is to analyse the photographs taken in real time with my PC using python programs and to keep the images which show interesting movement and to discard the frames which only show stars or satellites.

 

Camera modules (PCBs with lens) which operate at low light levels are available in black and white which is fine for the project, but I also want to capture the movement as a line rather than a series of dashes across the image. This means that I need to have a relatively fast frame rate and that needs a fast interface to my computer. Satellites are no problem because they move relatively slowly, but other things may be a lot faster and I estimate would need to capture and transfer maybe at least 2-5 frames per second? I dont know if this will be possible and still get the data to my computer.

 

I live in an apartment on the 12th floor so I have about 60 degrees side-to-side of visible sky and the whole height from directly above down to horizon (dont know how to describe this really). Looking rather like a slice of cake, pointy-end towards you.

 

I am leaning towards this camera module Sony Exmor IMX225 25-30USD (or the newer IMX291 50-130USD)camera but it does seem to show quite a bit of noise on a comparison a supplier sent me which was done by another of his customers. (cannot post URLs yet)

 

As you can probably tell, I am not very knowledgable when it comes to this kind of thing so I am hoping someone on this forum will be able to advise me please. Do I need to be concerned that the interface will not be able to transfer the data fast enough?

a) a Wifi IP

b) ethernet IP

c) serial

d) USB

 

So I guess my questions are

1) Which interface will be fast enough to transfer the data and send another image once a second or less (to get the meteors/UFOs)?

2) There are cameras which can take low-light images down to 0.01 or 0.001 Lux so I assume I would need the 0.001 Lux ones so that I can get the most light into the sensor in the shortest amount of time, but these have a certain amount of noise and grain which I fear would block out my stars etc.

 

Thanks.