Meteor Stats

For all of this data, I'm just parsing the already-existing GMN monthly summaries and just grabbing the info relevant to my stations and packing it up into histograms.

First is line-of-site distance.  For this I compute the great-circle distance between my latitude and longitude, and the center of the meteor path as projected onto the surface of the earth.  I also compute the height of the center of the path.  Using those two numbers, I can compute the line-of-site distance.

In my case, I have six cameras (USL00X, USL00Y, USL00Z, USL010, USL011, and USL012.  The distribution of LOS distances is shown below:

Each camera is color coded.  Light blue = 00X, orange = 00Y, yellow = 00Z, dark blue = 010, red = 011, black = 012.  In this case, the x-axis is the LOS distance in km, and the y-axis shows the number of meteors for a particular camera.

Next is Meteor trail length (km):

Meteor trail duration (in seconds):

Number of stations making a positive ID:

Magnitude:

... and finally a plot that shows the number of meteors detected for every hour of every day of the month of Dec 2021.  The x-axis is the day number of the month, and the y-axis is the hour of the day.  The lighter the color, the more meteors detected that hour:

Here they all are on one image:

Cloud Pre-Project Investigation

Still not quite sure what I'm gonna do with all-sky images of clouds, but now at least I know how to modify the camera parameters to allow me to have some hope of collecting some image data soon.  The next step will be to actually grab the images, store them in memory, and then write them to a FITS file.  Once I get that far, I can sit back and look at images and image sequences and see what I can do with them.

Here's a full-FOV image (USL012, pointing roughly north):

... and then here are a couple of smaller clouds showing internal structure details:

All Sky Camera Solar Eclipse

LOCAMS eclipsing the sun:

Strange Lights In Last Night's Sky

I can't account for this image sequence take with one of my cameras (USL010) last night (2021.12.23 UTC).  Time goes from left to right, top to bottom:

Literally looks like some kind of directed beam.  The video show it pretty well.  Timestamp about 00:11

Click here for video

Any ideas???

For context, here's a full FOV (89 x 47 degrees):

b Per Update

It's been cloudy and a bright moon these past several days.  Now it's past full moon and there's a little bit of dark now in the early evening.  Tonight's data looks promising sofar:

b Per is marked with the arrow.  Image taken at 04:48:06 UTC.  Nice S/N.

Headline: Astronomer Admits He Likes Clouds

I see this all-sky camera system eventually operating in four modes:

1. Daytime, Clear

2. Daytime, Cloudy

3. Nighttime, Clear

4. Nighttime, Cloudy

Much can be done with each of these...

Here's a Daytime, Cloudy image:

Algol Eclipse

Forgot to mention that I observed and measured a recent eclipse event of Algol on 5 Dec 2021 using cameras from my all sky system.

The results are very promising.

This first plot shows the brightness of Algol (black dots) and the brightness of a nearby reference star (red dots):

I can then use differental photometry to calculate a magnitude difference, and I get this:

The magnitude difference is just:

M2 - M1 = -2.5 log10 (I1 / I2)

where the M's are the magnitudes and the I's are the measured intensities.

I was able to just catch mid-eclipse, and it looks like the maximum difference is about 1.3 magnitudes, plus or minus about 0.1 magnitudes.  Looking up the actual numbers, I see that the difference is 1.27 magnitudes!  My conclusion is that I'm able to make accurate measurements with a decent amount of precision.