The Portable Sky Monitoring System, aka “Possums”, was deployed at Mill Cove Nature Center on Friday, March 21, 2025. The video produced by the all-sky camera showed nice images of zodiacal light, produced by the unique geometry of the early evening sky near the equinox and dust in the solar system. Look at the west horizon (right edge of this video) just after dark for a faint, narrow triangular feature.
Later in the evening, an aurora twice appears briefly in the north and northwest. In this video, north is up, look for the dancing aurora in the upper right, near the horizon.
The all-sky camera shows a circular image of the entire sky–horizon to horizon. You’ll notice the hills and grounds of Mill Cove surrounding the edge. This video was collected near the new pavilion, which can be seen on the left edge. Because we are recording a hemisphere onto a flat plane image, there is severe distortion around the edge of the image–making objects at the edge appear much shorter than they are in reality. Images were collected for a 45 second exposure each minute to make this movie. The white frames at the beginning of the movie are from the bright sky in twilight.