I’ve had a Tempest weatherflow weather station installed at my roll-off roof observatory now for a few years, working great. Just in the last few days, I’ve been bringing up an “All Sky” camera to monitor sky conditions. This is a camera and software combination that takes a 180-degree, horizon to horizon image every few minutes, makes cool time-lapse movies of sky conditions, etc.
It turns out that my Tempest sensor is just at the edge of the field-of-view of the all sky camera, and during long exposures at night (like 50 seconds), I see this funky glow coming from it. Here’s an example frame, annotated with a red arrow pointing at the Tempest sensor.
Here’s a more conventional photo of the Tempest, along with the all-sky camera mounted nearby.
Why would the device dimly glow? It’s not actually a problem, but I was surprised that a battery powered device might have LED indicator lamps or something that glow? It’s possible that the camera in question is sensitive to near IR wavelengths; could that be coming from somewhere? Just curious as to what’s going on, it’s not actually causing any problems, just that I’ve now got this itch to scratch wondering what’s going on.
