Fish River Sunrise

 ... because Fish River Sunset has gone away.

At our new place in Alabama, I mounted a ReoLink camera at the end of our boathouse. I have it pointed as near to true West as I can, given the blockage created by the big tree in our back yard. I've tried to use it to grab video, but my network design failed me and the path from the ReoLink to my Raspberry Pi is intermittently infested with delays as the Pi keeps stopping data transfers to look for new WiFi sources.

Stupid Pi. The Pi is less than 6" away from its access point, but the WiFi driver is such a blockhead that it can't stop checking for better signals every 2-3 seconds. That causes a 150ms delay which isn't enough to be noticeable by a user, but is enough to make the streaming video have ugly gaps in it.

I fell back and went for still shots every 10 seconds and then used ffmpeg to stitch them together into a video. Yay?

Well, sort of yay. By the time I had the thing running, the sun had walked itself out of the view of my camera.

Stupid sun.

As a result, I've fallen back again and now capture sunrises, just for grins. I'm pointed in the opposite direction, but I thought they might be interesting. Here's today's. I think it's worth clicking over to YouTube to watch a full-screen version, but that's just me.

I love seeing the ducks cruise past. There are two whites and one mallard. They like to come into my backyard and grumble at me in their ducky language. It's wonderful. I reward them with bread sometimes, which they eat, but reluctantly. I don't have any fish to give them and I'm not going to go to the bait shop just for a trio of grumbly ducks.

(Let's see how long that vow lasts.)

Diagnosing The Problem

Using the lat lon of the camera and picking out landmarks in the video, I was able to figure out the angles in my field of view. Directly in front of my camera is 310 degrees. The far left is 268 degrees. Sunset right now is at 276. Why can't I get a good sunset? The trees are too dense on the far left.

Stupid trees.

Moving off the left hand side of the view to the first filtered shot of sort-of horizon, you get an angle of 290. Since sunset is 276 degrees, I'm out of luck until... when? Try May. My sunset camera as currently mounted will give me sunsets from May to August.

I could mount it on a pole, of course. If I give it enough height, I can aim it over the top of the tree and point it due West or perhaps a bit Southwest.

I could also come back to the house and look up at an empty pole where the camera used to be until it got sheered off by a storm coming in off the Gulf.

Oh well. It's still been a ton of fun and it's just the start of the cool things we can do at the River House.