A modern video meteor detection system and network – Overview and typical costs
2013 November 29
During the past decade video technology has been used by groups in Japan, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom and, more recently, the United States to record hundreds of thousands of meteors. What makes these recordings stand out is that they were carried out by coordinated networks of observers, and that in many cases each event was captured from multiple locations. Through the use of triangulation the velocity, trajectory and orbit of the parent meteoroid has been derived and from this our knowledge of the major showers and many of the minor showers has significantly improved. This has helped refine the mathematical models of the streams and has led to better predictions of how a particular shower will behave in a given year.
However there is still much work to be done. Of the 493 suspected showers on the International Astronomical Union’s Meteor Data Centre (IAU MDC), only 95 have ‘Established’ status. Proving the existence of a shower or differentiating between showers with similar radiants requires additional observations. As technology improves and prices fall, amateur observers, working in coordinated networks, can make increasingly precise contributions. This paper provides an overview of a typical video-based meteor detection system, requirements for an effective network and looks to the future of how this type of work may progress.
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