Testing my homemade glass enclosure for the Ricoh Theta X in heavy rain.
It rained hard all day long. I left the camera idling under the dome all day to see if it would get wet and fail, or if some other problem would crop up.
Clearly the dome needs Rain-X on it. But also the inside of the glass gets covered in condensation after a few hours in high humidity, because the camera keeps the inside a lot hotter than the outside. This will get covered in ice this winter for sure.
Also, it doesn’t show in the video, but a fly got inside and couldn’t get out, buzzing around the camera all day long.
So I’m working on a properly waterproof variant that will prevent most of the air from coming inside the enclosure, so I can put some silica gel in it to dehumidify the air once and for all. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to actively circulate the air with a fan, which I’d rather not do.
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Cinematographers use a continuous spinning disc of glass in front of the lens to prevent droplets from forming in wet conditions. To extend your project, perhaps you could develop a spinning dome around the y-axis and you’d have drop free rain footage. I realize this would be rather involved.
Yeah I would need some sort of giant bearing to mount the dome onto, and a motor that I could somehow hide under the base to spin it - because being a 360 camera, the more visible junk you have at the nadir, the more surrounding you lose. That would be involved indeed.
But I won’t need this, for two reasons:
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My plan is to setup the camera in the winter, in freezing conditions, to capture the northern lights. It won’t rain on it, it will snow. At least if the camera doesn’t heat up the dome so much that it melts the snow on it I guess: it runs surprisingly hot.
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If it rains or if it snows, there won’t be anything worth recording in the sky anyway 🙂
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