The screens

Skylapse is a web app served by the camera itself. Open it on a phone, tablet or desktop at http://skylapse.local (or http://10.42.0.1 on the camera’s own Wi-Fi). It installs as a PWA if you want an icon on your home screen.

Dashboard

The latest frame, a status pill driven by whether frames are actually arriving (not by what the daemon claims), a countdown to the next one, storage, and the Save RAW button — the keeper button for when a meteor just went past.

Focus assist starts from here too.

Nights

Every night captured, with frame counts and sizes. Open one to:

• scrub the filmstrip frame by frame, with a star-count chart to find the clear stretch
• jump between frames that have RAW files
• watch the timelapse rendered at dawn
• download any frame as JPEG or DNG
• export to USB — copy the night to a stick, with a config backup alongside it and integrity checks on the copy

Skylapse deletes the oldest nights automatically when free space runs low, frames first and timelapses last. See Storage & RAW.

Focus assist

Start it from the dashboard, then zoom to 8× and turn the ring until the sharpness number peaks. The live view zooms 1×–10× into the full-resolution sensor image. Nothing is written to the card while focusing, and it exits by itself after 15 minutes.

Camera

Everything about the imaging itself, one tab per thing you tune:

• Capture schedule — 24/7 or night-only.
• Exposure profiles — day / night / twilight, chosen from sun altitude, plus a manual mode for star-tracker rigs.
• RAW policy — off, on demand, on a schedule, or every frame (read Storage & RAW first).
• Timelapse options — length and quality for the dawn render, with one-off overrides.
• White balance — red and blue sliders per camera with “Auto from current frame”.
• Hardware — declare a board the Pi cannot detect, add a ZWO camera, install ZWO support.

Heater

The dew heater’s own tab: automatic from the BME280 dewpoint, or a manual on/off switch that needs no sensor at all, plus a timed test pulse for commissioning the wiring. See Dew heater — including the power-supply warning, which is there for measured reasons.

Network

Wi-Fi and reaching the camera, together:

• Wi-Fi & access point — switch to access-point mode by hand, with timed options. See Wi-Fi & access point.
• Remote access — view the camera from anywhere through your own free Tailscale account: one-tap install, QR-code sign-in, and a permanent https://…ts.net address. The camera is never exposed to the open internet.

Settings

What is set once and rarely revisited:

• Notifications — phone alerts over ntfy. See Phone alerts.
• Config backup, an optional password, logs readable from the page, a clean restart button, and updates with automatic rollback if the new version doesn’t come up healthy.

Updates

Settings checks for a new release and installs it in place. If the new version does not come up healthy, Skylapse rolls back to the previous one by itself. Installing from a checkout instead of the image? Then updating is git pull && sudo systemctl restart skylapse-daemon — see Development.