Raspberry Pi camera long exposure night samples

bp2008

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This week I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi 2 and the 5 MP camera module to see how it could compare to my automated Olympus SP-500UZ camera. I also got the "noir" camera module which is the same camera, but without the infrared filter.



My last experience with a Raspberry Pi was a few years ago with a normal model B Pi. The experience with the Pi 2 was much nicer, not only because it is a much faster device, but because the OS and software have matured since then.

I used meteotux_pi for capturing images, since the Pi camera is only capable of (up to) 6 second exposures and requires some other advanced settings to perform as well as possible at night. Meteotux_pi handles capturing and combining multiple long exposure frames into even longer exposures, and hides all the complexity of white balance and ISO settings.

I tried the normal camera module first (the one with an IR filter), and did some 60 second exposures with Meteotux.



There is a strong green cast that fades away over the first few frames. Likely the auto white balance took a while to figure out what was going on.

Here is one of them.


Here is what the Olympus camera produced with a 60 second exposure at the same time. Much better. Looks like I won't be replacing the complicated Olympus SP-500UZ setup any time soon.





Next, I swapped the normal camera module for the noir camera module.


Here is that green cast again, but much brighter now because I have infrared cameras covering my front yard. (remember this is 60 seconds of exposure too)

I waited for the green cast to subside and moved the camera over to the left to better capture the scene.


Not bad, considering it is looking through a bedroom window so there is some reflection. Even up high in the distant trees where my IR lighting has no effect, it is brighter than what I captured with the normal camera module.

It had gotten darker and the Olympus images were looking like this. I daresay the noir camera module can compete with the Olympus camera for low light, long exposure captures. Even in areas that have no infrared illumination.


I then pointed the Pi noir camera at the sky to see how that looked. Not bad.






Next, I swapped the normal camera back in and pointed it at the sky. It was getting really dark outside now, so all it could see were stars, lens flare from the moon, and a fair amount of sensor noise (bright pixels that look like stars, but they don't move).



At this point I gave up on getting good night shots from the normal camera module.




I put the noir module back in again, pointed it at the sky, and created a short timelapse with Meteotux. It was supposed to run all night but due to the Pi having the wrong time zone it stopped at midnight.

 
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bp2008

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Oh, also, the noir camera module predictably has terrible daytime color.

-----

This is what it is supposed to look like:
 

bp2008

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This snapshot is taken with the normal Pi camera (which has a permanent IR filter).




I started using https://github.com/silvanmelchior/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface which provides a handy web interface for the camera. The feature that interests me most is that it efficiently and reliably hosts JPEG frames and MJPEG streams which you can integrate with 3rd party software. Thanks to hardware acceleration and the higher specs of the Pi 2, I even got it streaming 5 megapixel MJPEG video at about 7 FPS, while only using 10% CPU. It will of course stream higher frame rates at lower resolution, where the bandwidth required per frame is not so tremendous.
 

bp2008

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w1zofaz

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I would like to have seen the all night long time lapse starting just after sunset to as the sky is getting light again. :)
 

bp2008

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New 8MP cam and pi 3 came in. The pi 3 is okay, nothing special over the pi 2 for me. The camera has really bad focus and if what I have read is true, this affects everyone and can only be marginally improved by removing the glue from the lens and manually re-focusing. Until this is fixed in production, I recommend that nobody buys the v2 camera.

From Cam V2 (8 MP):


From Cam V1 (5 MP):


More info about the new camera, from other sites:

http://raspi.tv/2016/new-and-old-raspberry-pi-camera-comparison-shots-1-3-2-1-noir

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=145815
 
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bp2008

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The new camera doesn't seem any better at low light than the old one. These snapshots are all using automatic settings. New camera on the left, old on the right. Yeah, they aren't pointed exactly the same, but that doesn't really matter. The sky gets dark at the same time on both.







 

bp2008

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I have drastically improved the focus of the new v2 (8MP) camera by manually rotating the lens.

Before / After



Before / After



Here are some from the V1 (5MP) camera pointed the same directions. I never had to adjust focus of the V1 camera.



 

bp2008

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Keep in mind some of the pics may have localized blurry spots due to rain on the window. Especially the last one from the V1 cam.
 

TechBill

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Cool!

I also meddle with Raspberry as well too.

I have a Raspberry running an arcade emulator.

I just brought Raspberry 3 which I plan to do home automation using wireless z-wave and set up whole house light alerts flashing and a z-wave color light to tell us what alert is for. Example green - door, red - fire alarm, yellow - security alarm, blue - baby monitor and flashing green - video phone etc.

Yes I also read about the new camera had focus set wrong at the factory requiring readjustment. Same thing happened to XiaoMi Yi when I purchased it some year back. It a GoPro clone and a very good one but some of the batch got released with bad focus so we had to take it apart to remove the hot glue and manually refocused it however it still an excellent camera for it price.



Bill
 
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