I think the all-sky camera is not necessarily IR, a standard camera should be sufficient.

From what I get from the paper, a simple 1/0 detection/counting of stars (detected or not) will not take into account the possibility of light clouds through which some starlight could pass attenuated and be detected, leading to think that there are no clouds, thus giving a wrong estimation of the cloud cover. It may be interesting to evaluate the usefulness of coupling an all-sky camera star counting algorithm to a small FOV MLX90614 sensor to measure the "telescope pointed" sky temperature. You may still need to account for atmospheric effects and other factors but that's making for a more interesting/challenging project.

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