The Allsky1 camera system has been up and running since December 2005… coming up on 10 years!

Last week, we renovated it by removing the 14″ dome, removed the 28watts of heaters, removed the 1watt circulation fan and remounted the camera.
It is supposed to be weatherproof or weather resistant. We shall see.

Some of the issues with the old design were:
flies, bugs and bees were getting inside the dome, sticking to the underside of the dome, pooping on the camera lens and in general were being a real pain.
The heaters took a lot of power and sometimes still did not stop condensation and fogging.
The fan would burn out fairly regularly and make a lot of noise as well.

This is an initial image of the new setup;

After 1 week it seems to be surviving the weather fine. As a bonus the horizon is a little better as is the contrast on the images themselves.
The moon glare is not as bad as it used to be with the big dome overhead.
The camera system itself is probably another 5-10 years old before we got it as a donation.
It currently takes an 80 second exposure and then takes about 10 seconds to download via a large camera controller and a parallel port cable…. wayy before USB.

When it does fail, we will replace it with something a lot newer, better resolution (657×495 currently), maybe even colour to pick up aurora better, faster downloads (so there is not so much down time while downloading images).
It’s primary use is to watch for bolides/fireballs/bright meteors, but its secondary is to show cloud cover for observing and pretty pictures.