Meteor spotting?

[ApophisAstros]

I do that with my ASC with Sharpcap at 30s exposure continuously , and join .AVI files (can be over 14000 frames sometimes and laboriously go through the movie to find events.
Roger.

[Rick]

The Global Meteor Network software which runs of a Raspberry Pi (3 or 4) and does automatic scanning for meteor events. Apparently they're experimenting with the use of all-sky cameras ( https://globalmeteornetwork.org/?p=163 ), but I suspect they probably pretty much take the camera over completely, and I've no idea how they'd cope with cameras other than the ones they've chosen.

[Rick]

Here's first light from the RMS camera I put together and left running overnight. Considering how murky the sky looked, I was quite surprised to see anything, but at least a few of the 58 events are meteors, though quite a few are satellites, planes or moths.



The planes usually show as blinking lights, and they're mostly in this stack because they're on a frame that also has another event on it. The satellites are most easily discernable because they're relaatively slow moving, and therefore appear on several consecutive frames. Each frame is made from ten seconds of sub-frames captured at 25 frames per second, so fast-moving meteors often have short breaks at 1/25th of a second intervals, but the satellites move slowly enough not to show breaks except between frames (when the gap's slightly longer).

[Rick]

A fireball has been reported by numerous observers from South Wales to Essex this evening at 22:08:

https://twitter.com/UKMeteorNetwork/status/1458928463587459076

The Ipswich All-Sky camera also caught a good image of it.

[Carole]

I must say I find looking for meteor showers rather underwhelming, I think the only way I would be interested is to do something like rick, or set up a camera for several hours and stack the subs.

Carole

[Rick]

Indeed. Sitting out in the dark waiting to catch sight of one live is often a rather underwhelming experience. I can heartily recommend setting up an automatic camera to do the watching for you, though.

[ApophisAstros]

I leave my ASC on for 10 hours at night and struggle to find 1 or 2 and its a cracking camera , can image the milkyway.
Roger

[Rick]

That's where the auto-detection comes in handy. The Global Meteor Network camera system design isn't up to deep-sky imaging, but it does a good job of spotting meteors. Last night's bright event (at 22:08:51 UTC) was also caught by at least a couple of All-sky cameras, one in Ipswich and one in Eastbourne, so if you have a recording you may be able to find it. It was at least mag. -4. The Ipswich camera got a great view, as the meteor wasn't that far off directly overhead. The Eastbourne one caught it fairly near the horizon.

[ApophisAstros]

I think they must stack weeks and weeks  at a time to get that effect as i get them fine, but not very often.
roger

[Rick]

There are a selection of images from the Ipswich camera on the Orwell Astronomical Society's site. The one of the recent fireball hasn't been put up there yet. It's a 60-second exposure with a rotating shutter, and was shared on the UKMON email list but you'd need to subscribe to see the messages.

[ApophisAstros]

Why arent they visible down here then? As i see i get a few occasionally but not on the volume they seem to have.
Roger

[Rick]

Darker skies? A more sensitive camera?  The all-sky cameras only seem to catch the very bright meteors, and those don't happen every night. My camera caught only 4 meteors brighter than mag. -2 in October, and only 3 in September, and all the UK cameras put together have only seen a dozen or so events brighter than mag. -4 this year.

A lot is going to depend on how well the camera catches transient events, too. A meteor is going to be illuminating each pixel its path crosses for only a short time, wheras the Milky Way will be integrating happily for the entire time the frame's being gathered (which, for the Ipswich camera, is apparently 60 seconds), so meteors have to be much brighter to show up on any particular frame.

[Rick]

A wonderful all-sky composite of the Perseids as seen from Greece in this EPOD: https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2021/12/meteor-panorama-and-zodiacal-light-from-greece.html

[Carole]

That's great

Carole

[AndrewRamsay]

Amazing - and not just for "five days of clear nights"!