I've been using my discord server as a blog, and that needs to end. THIS is the place to talk about my astro work.
About a month and a half ago I acquired a LOCAMS system in collaboration with Lowell Observatory. This is an all-sky camera system using six cameras and six raspberry pi's to detect and measure meteor events.
This system is also part of the Global Meteor Network, which contains some 500 stations (and growing) worldwide.
Each camera in my system has it's own designation:
USL00X
USL00Y
USL00Z
USL010
USL011
USL012
The field of view of these cameras is about 90 degrees by 45 degrees -- so a fairly nice chunk of sky. Each camera points to a different part of the sky, with a little bit of overlap. I've yet to make a full mosaic, but it's on my list.
The cameras are running at about 25 frames per second. The software grabs 256 frames at a time but after that I haven't gotten into the software enough to know what exactly it's doing. I'll describe more of the details as I learn them.
My station will detect several hundred meteors every night, but only a few of them are seen by another station. This makes for a legitimate detection since not only did an independent station see the event, but the software can now combine the data from each station and triangulate in order to get a 3D position of the meteor trail.
In the end, various detection event reports are created. One of them is a table with the beginning and ending latitude, longitude, and altitude. I can take this data and compute line-of-sight distance and meteor trail length for each event. I can then make a plot of each showing the distribution of distances and lengths:
These histograms shows detection from the first 8 nights of Dec 2021.
Notice that one meteor trail was 100km long! Here's a picture of it from USL010 on 4 Dec 2021:
Just really quick there was a nice fireball going right by Sirius on the 4th. Left a trail for >5 min afterwards. Here are some pics:
more as time allows...
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