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I recently got my Raspberry-Pi-powered meteor camera up and running again, after a three-year pause while I lived abroad and tinkered with the software. I still have a few software glitches, including a tendency to drop frames whilst tracking long-lived objects like planes and satellites. But it’s starting to produce some interesting detections.
This detection from 19.51 last night is rather curious… <https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/moving_obj.php?id=20200306_195102_5a478ea7297f1cdd>. Looks like two meteors grazing the atmosphere in close formation. They’re so symmetrical that I originally thought it must be a video artifact.
The main challenge software-wise is currently getting to camera to automatically calibrate where it’s pointing, and the radial lens abberations (barrel distortion), using astrometry.net. This was always a bit hit and miss in the previous incarnation of the software, but we’ve made a lot of progress in the past month. It mostly gets it right, except when it doesn’t… 🙂
That’s an impressive capture. I’ve seen many examples of dual, and even triple, meteors with the same radiant on my video but never anything quite like this where there are two objects so close. It was clear here last night and my NW cam points in your direction but I didn’t pick anything up at that time.
I’m playing around with RMS using a Pi4 and a cheap IP camera but haven’t had much time to sort out the various problems that have arisen so still rely on the old UFO Capture/902H2 setup.
Pete Lawrence has suggested on Facebook that they could be a pair of birds. This seems quite plausible, especially as the two tracks cover the whole height of the frame, are of very similar brightness, and have no evident flares.
Certainly if there is no confirmation from another camera this would be the most likely cause. I get quite a lot of nocturnal birds/bats on mine illuminated by streetlights but they don’t tend to fly in straight lines.
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