Lowell Observatory | Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance | 2018 Aug 10
Just in time for the upcoming Perseid meteor shower, a new meteor surveillance station has come on-line at Meteor Crater, Arizona. A box of 16 off-the-shelf video surveillance cameras is used to monitor the night sky for meteors over the famous impact crater. Powerful software combines the meteor detections with those at other stations at Lowell Observatory, Lowell’s Discovery Channel Telescope, and at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in order to triangulate the meteors and track their motion through the atmosphere. ...
LO-CAMS is part of a larger network of cameras called CAMS, “Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance”, which originated in California and is led by meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
CAMS stands apart from other modern meteor observing programs in that it uses a fly’s eye approach that stitches together the results from an array of 16 cameras, rather than a single camera with a fish eye lens as is typical of other programs. This multi-camera setup results in a more precise determination of meteor positions. ...
The camera systems will be put to good use this weekend to observe the Perseid Meteor Shower, which is active from July 17 to August 24 but peaks on the evening of August 12th / morning of the 13th. With no interfering light from the Moon—its phase will be just a day past new—some 60-70 meteors per hour may be visible.