Weather station for our observatory

[patrickduis]

Hello, I'm planning a weather station for our observatory. I already have good experience at home with my Alecto WS-5000 (see http://sterrenwachtmyrtha.waarnemen.com/index.htm, it also includes a SAM magnetometer for geomagnetic storm monitoring). This was a fairly low-cost solution.

At our observatory (http://www.sterrenwachthalley.nl) we are building a large 40cmF30 solar telescope to show the kids during daytimes nice details on the Sun, where things quickly change in minutes. Besides this we add a 150mm Lunt for viewing the whole Sun in Halpha (incl. prominences), a 60mm Lunt for viewing the Sun in CaK light and a 130mm apochromatic refractor for viewing the Sun in white light.
All telescopes have special narrowband filters....so don't worry.

The telescope will be used in the morning remotely by experienced amateur solar imagers (and astronomy-students testing their software) and in the midday for showing kids from schools visiting our observatory live views from the Sun.

Since this expensive equipment must be protected well against Dutch weather. It will be installed in a new 3rd tent-dome (because wind must blow through the instrument for better seeing).

The dome must close when clouds are coming in (with risk of rain), therefore we planned the following meteorology:
- cloud sensor (when clouds come in, scope will be parked automatically and dome will shut)
- weather station (rain sensor, UV and solar power monitoring, wind and relative humidity incl. local forecasting).
Besides this we will install:
- a sky quality monitor (SQM measurement, that monitors the brightness of the sky at night, this measures light pollution)
- a SAM 3-axis magnetometer for monitoring solar activity (detects particles from the Sun entering our atmosphere after outbursts of the Sun on previous days).

Things we need:
- wireless station with automatic solar charging during the days
- wireless connection to the base station
- logging on a PC with cumulus, we prefer an IP connection from the base station to the PC (server) which resides in the cellar of our building while the base-station is on the reception desk

For this we are considering the Davis vantage Pro2 or the Vue, but we are still puzzled a bit.......therefore I ask you all for advice (which is most appreciated).

We got an European Union grant for implementing this beautiful project, so we have some money reserved for this weather station.

See how the project evolves at our Dutch Amateur Solar Telescope page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/497422120372008/ and http://www.zonnetelescoop.nl

[Jim Brown]

I think you should look at a Davis envoy with USB logger rather than the IP logger.

[patrickduis]

Yeah, that could also be a nice solution.
We can put the Davis base-station on the desk of our observatory so everyone in the building can easily see the current weather conditions (and carry it around the building, if desired).
We put the envoy in the basement connected to one of our server-pcs: that can send the online data to our website via cumulus....