Geminid meteor shower

Mike,

This is an incentive to resurrect the old all sky camera system here to be up and operational. Its been non operational for a awhile now. I was really saving on electric usage. I remember you upgrading to the software,I presume that's the capture and analyser software from Sonotaco. It is quite amazing as to its functionality. It would make sence to have a wide distribution of cameras for triangulation of meteors which means we could report much better scientific information to some of the European organizations. BTW, I had Apostollis Christou from Armagh Observatory down here for two days, just last week. He told me that there is a European meeting on meteors taking place at Armagh in 2010.

If I got my system operational again, then Ireland would have at least 5 stations. Larne, Armagh, Rathmoylan, Bray and Boyle. It seems a good distribution. I can cover 360 degs as the system here is a multiple one. At least I think I'm not out of date as regards the technology.

Eamonn A

www.kingslandobservatory.com

michaeloconnell wrote:

Very interesting discussion here.
What kind of money are we talking to have one of these cameras up and running?

Michael.

My set-up was a little less expensive - I cosied up to some nice scientists at Sandia Labs in the USA and smiled sweetly. They sent me the camera and housing for free! I couldn't get their Linux-based control software to work properly so I purchased HandiAVI (which has it's own limitations.) I started out using a PC-TV frame grabber as recommended by Sandia but that was really poor quality, so I picked up the Canopus ADVC110 box on eBay for next to nothing. The Canopus frame grabber is *excellent* and delivers the full resolution of the camera at the full 30fps rate. The project leader at Sandia mentioned that they might be prepared to ship a second unit to me if I could find someone willing to operate it full time. Ideally the cameras would be widely spaced around the country for maximum accuracy in triangulation. The entire aim of the Sandia project is to retrieve meteorite material that has survived passing through the atmosphere to the ground - slim chance... but pretty neat if we secede!

Phil.

PS - I've been running the SonotaCo capture software for a few hours this evening and already it has demonstrated that it can ignore aircraft! So far, so good!