Weather Warning Equipment

I personally would avoid Defraction Limited. It may require using MaximDL. I still use Maxim and it has become extremely out dated for the cost. I bought a used Starlight Xpress Oculus all Sky camera for around $600. But, They rarely come up for used sale. However, the Oculus is only an all Sky camera. It is not  a weather monitoring system.  A ZWO non- cooled camera with the all Sky lens/ ASIAIR combo will near do the same thing. But unlike the Oculus it is not weather proof. There are online instructions to make your own weather proof all Sky camera, if you have electrical knowledge. 

But if you want a more complete weather monitoring system. I think the Lunatico Astronomy products are a good buy.  I plan to incorporate some of their products into my Pod.

Here is a link to the cloud sensor page. You can excess other products from there.

https://shop.lunaticoastro.com/?product=aag-cloudwatcher-cloud-detector

Lynn K.

I also would avoid Diffraction Limited. Their Boltwood was a good unit in it's day (early 2000's) and I had one of the old ones that was OK but when I replaced it with another after 10 years or so due to a failure, the second one was total garbage and gave me constant false roof closures. Add to that it is the most expensive. Support operates on the "customer is always wrong" principle as well. 

Next I went to the commonly used Sky Alert (Interactive Astronomy) and went with the recommended ethernet version. That was fine for a month or so and then the ethernet circuit died. They offered replacement or refund and I chose refund so I can't fault their support.

I wound up getting the Lunatico (AAG Cloudwatcher) and so far it has been great. It also can use serial which is more robust for this kind of application, assuming you use it with a native serial port.

I used to run this in my backyard obs. It's not as festure packaged as the AAG but it gets the job done. 

https://www.hitecastro.co.uk/index.php/products/item/hitec-weather-deluxe.html

Barry Schellenberg:
AAG Cloudwatcher. 

My first unit lasted 12years and could have probably gone longer. They have had some hardware upgrades since and this is a device you cannot have fail. 

The service is second to none. Jaime Alemany is very, very helpful. They stand by their product and have many other useful devices for observatories.

Barry,

I will also second the support. They are extremely responsive