The mist

I cleaned the glass dome as well as I could yesterday, to get rid of all the dust particles inside and out. Then I let the camera roll.

We had a clear night yesterday for the first time in weeks. That way I could test the best sensor speed and shutter speed to capture at least enough light to see the stars without creating a lot of noise in the image - even now that the night still isn't really dark yet - and whether the moon would create reflections inside the glass dome with really long exposure times.

I'm very happy with the results: the moon does create a few artifacts on the top of the cloche when passing overhead. But other than that, the image is pretty much free of defects. This is much better than Ricoh's own TH-3 enclosure!

Then heavy fog dropped onto the lake. So I let the camera roll until the next day, because why not... This is the result.

As luck would have it, we had a small aurora yesterday around 22:50, over the houses on the left. It wasn't much, but it was enough to confirm that this setup would be able to see the northern lights - which is the entire purpose of this setup. I'll probably have to bump up the ISO speed or leave the shutter open for longer this winter to get something more visible.