The cameras have seen their first onsite camera test at our home base here in Fairbanks. We put out four cameras around the outside of our accommodations here to see how well they held their internal temperature and to test the consistency of time syncing across the different camera units. We were very pleased to see that the timing seems to work very well with the built-in Real-Time-Clock (RTC) showed very little drift over the time period of one night (as expected).
We’ve spent the day making a few changes to the code and thinking about updates that we want to make to the camera deployment procedure. In particular, we’ve made it easier to deploy the cameras without the aid of another computer to start the acquisition and we’ve improved the robustness of the measurement timing to reduce dropout in the temperature and magnetometry data. We didn’t worry about alignment to north for this test case, but we’ve also landed on a procedure for standardizing camera orientation.
You can check out a time lapse of the night’s data below:
No aurora yet with the clouds in the way, but we’re hopeful there will be a gap in the clouds in the coming days.