Test timelapse with the camera inside a glass dome

Today I tried installing my Ricoh Theta X camera inside a small glass dome and it yielded surprisingly good results.

Here's today's timelapse video:

The pictures are much better than with the camera inside a large acrylic sphere. Scratches in the glass are visible in darkness (for instance when the moon passes overhead) and any dust specks are really visible, making cleaning the dome really quite time consuming. Some light reflections around the apex are visible also, but they're not too bad.

In addition, when the camera is taking pictures, it warms itself up under the dome quite significantly: it sits a good 20C warmer than ambient temperature. So there's a good chance that I might not need a heater at all this winter.

This glass dome is surprisingly good optically, yet it came from a cheap Aliexpress 7.50€ table lamp. I got really lucky to find this!

I reckon this setup will do very nicely to capture the northern lights.