Clear Sky Detection with Deep Learning and an Inexpensive Infrared Camera for Robot Telescopes

Automation methods can be applied in robot telescopes for autonomous operation. The clear sky detection is a key point for the telescopes to observe night sky in adequate conditions and close their domes in the case of a potential rainfall. The authors of this paper taken images of the night sky by a low-cost camera of a Raspberry Pi and trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect clear sky on the pictures. The developed model reached 95.74% accuracy on unseen samples hence it was proved to be ready for production use.