Perseids - Meteor Cam

[JohnP]

Hi All,

Thought I would try something different. I have been playing around with an old B&W CCTV security camera that I purchased about 6 years ago (Chris got one as well). The camera has pretty poor resolution & can only record video at 320 X 240 but has a .003 LUX rating which isn't too bad although, todays camera have ratings of .0001 or lower.

I hooked the camera up to a desktop PC using a USB video grabber (actually a Hauppage WinTV USB stick). I downloaded a trial version of some brilliant motion capture software from here: http://sonotaco.com/e_index.html
The software basically detects motion in the video frame & then starts recording - it buffers the video stream into memory so you can specify how many before & after frames you want to capture so you don't miss the event. There are also controls for setting sensitivity etc.

I wasn't sure camera would be sensitive enough as I could just about see Vega with it through the noise. Anyway I set it up last night & pointed it in general direction of Cassiopia & left it running until 4am this morning. I ended up getting about 25 video's most of which were planes or satellites but ended up with about 5 meteor captures

The best one is shown below which as you can see was captured around 22:40:45secs. The meteor first shows at 22:40:45.6secs is brightest at 22:40:46.2secs and disappears at 22:40:46.6secs i.e. lasted 1 sec. I was recording at 10fps. The video file is quite large so I have used virtual Dub (thanks Ian) to trim the before & after frames, I also brightened frame a little & increased size slightly. I then used VDub to export to a continuously looping gif for display. The metor must have actually been quite a big one as it was much much brighter than Vega.

Anyway - It was all good fun. Next step to get myself a more sensitive CCTV camera so I can have some stars in the image as well. I may well house the camera in a waterproof enclosure & leave running for a few weeks/ months...The actually points of light in my image are not stars they are hot pixels. Also forgot to say I downloaded another utility called AtomClock that synchronizes the clock on my computer so the time stamps are pretty accurate.

Anyway here is the gif file of my first meteor....

Cheers,  John

[MarkS]

Good one!
That's an interesting project and you've got a nice result there.

I wonder if it would be possible to do the same with a webcam - I'm sure there was some kind of motion detecting software that came with one of mine.

Mark

[Fay]

Glad you had a result John. So it stops & starts when  motion is detected?

[JohnP]

The security camera is running all the time - the recording stops & starts when motion is detected...

[Fay]

is it expensive to buy, not sure about yen rate. Certainly seems a good program, very versatile

[JohnP]

I'm using 30-day free trial at the moment... it's all good fun... John

[JohnP]

I wonder if it would be possible to do the same with a webcam - I'm sure there was some kind of motion detecting software that came with one of mine.

Hi Mark, don't see why not. Like I say I could barely see Vega with the Security Camera I used so as long as you can see Vega in normal video mode at say 5 or 10 fps it should work...

John

[mickw]

That's a cool project, nice one John 

[JohnP]

Cheers Mick - Will be better if/ when I can get a more sensitive camera.... John

[Rick]

Nice one, John!

[The Thing]

Nice one, John!

[Mike]

Excellent John. Nice little project. You should make a permanent installation. I've been wanting to do that myself for a while now.

[JohnP]

Thks All.

Mike - I think I will - Just get myself a better camera & then stick something up on the roof... you never know might capture evidence of those orange balls or delta winged aircraft that have been sighted....

[RobertM]

That's an excellent little project John, much better than staying up all night that's for sure !  I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses, a more sensitive cam would make the world of a difference.  You could also try a faster lens, I'm sure you could pick something up from EBay or a boot sale for not much dosh.

Robert

[Rick]

I wonder if it would be possible to do the same with a webcam - I'm sure there was some kind of motion detecting software that came with one of mine.

I doubt you'd need anything too sophisticated in the way of motion detection, provided you can get a reliably non-shimmery video image. A little bit of frame-averaging and a simple spot-the-difference approach would probably work fairly well. Something to deal with the hot pixels might be an advantage, though.