Set up a sky camera

The capture service watches the night sky through a network camera on your own computer and records only what moves. It runs entirely on your machine — once it is signed in to your UAP Finder account, the phone app can find it.

What you need

A Windows PC that stays on overnight, ideally wired rather than on Wi-Fi.
An RTSP network camera pointed at the sky. Anything exposing a main and a sub stream works — the sub stream feeds detection, the main stream is recorded. Reolink models are what this was built and tested against (a CX820 runs the reference camera).
FFmpeg on your PATH — the service uses it to decode and record. winget install Gyan.FFmpeg
Disk space. Clips are full quality. Budget tens of gigabytes and let retention reclaim the rest.

Set the camera up first

Five minutes in the camera's own settings saves far more later — the detector sees whatever the camera shows it, including things you stop noticing yourself.

Turn off the on-screen clock and any text overlay. A burned-in timestamp changes every second, and a detector cannot tell that from a light moving. Ours chained events all night before we spotted it.
Turn off the spotlight and any IR flood aimed into the sky.
Fix the exposure if the camera lets you. Auto-exposure hunting reads as the whole frame changing at once.
Enable RTSP and note the username and password. Give the camera a static address or a DHCP reservation so it does not move.
Aim it at open sky. Trees at the edge of frame are the single largest source of false detections — branches move all night in any breeze.

Download

An account is what pairs the camera to you — it is how your phone finds it later, and there is no other pairing step. Registration is free and takes a moment. Create one.

Install it

Unzip it somewhere permanent, for example C:\UAPFinder\svc.
Right-click PowerShell, Run as administrator, then run .\install-service.ps1 from that folder. It registers the service, sets it to start automatically and restart on failure, puts a UAP Finder Camera shortcut on your desktop, and allows the two ports through Windows Firewall so your phone can reach it on your home network. That is your PC's own firewall — it does not change anything on your router.
Open the dashboard from that shortcut — it lives at http://localhost:5199.
Fill in the camera address and password, then the mount section: where the camera is and which way it points. Your exact position never leaves your machine; the public map only ever shows a deliberately blurred location.
In the Account panel, sign in with the same UAP Finder account you use on this site. That is the entire pairing step — no codes, no port numbers, nothing to copy across.

Tune it on the first clear night

Defaults are deliberately cautious. Two settings decide whether you wake up to a handful of real captures or a thousand pieces of noise.

Set the schedule to Night. Capture pauses until the sun is well below the horizon. Left on Always, a camera films drifting cloud all afternoon.
Mask anything that isn't sky. The dashboard's ignore zones blank a region from detection only — recordings are untouched. Cover treetops, roof lines, and any corner where foliage intrudes. On the reference camera this alone cut events from roughly a thousand a night to under a hundred.
Star-calibrate the aim when you have a clear night. The dashboard lists which bright stars are up; click three or more in the live view and solve. Everything downstream — satellite matching, aircraft matching, the "is that just Vega?" check — inherits the accuracy of that aim.

Then, on your phone

You do not need to open a port, forward anything, or enable UPnP. On your home Wi-Fi the app talks to the camera directly, which is fastest and keeps the video on your own network. From anywhere else it falls back to a relay: your camera holds an outgoing connection to this site, and requests travel back down that. Nothing on your home network listens for incoming connections, so there is nothing to expose — and it works even if your internet provider puts you behind shared carrier addressing, where port forwarding cannot work at all.

What is and isn't shared

Signing the camera in only makes it discoverable by you. Publishing sightings to the public map is a separate switch that stays off until you turn it on.

On your home network, video goes straight from your camera to your phone and never touches this site. Away from home it necessarily passes through it, because that relay is what removes the need to open your network — those bytes are held only long enough to reach your phone and are not added to the public archive. If you would rather that never happen, watch clips at home; the app always prefers the direct path when it can reach the camera.