(meteorobs) Fireball cameras

[Chris Peterson]

Hi Paco-

My experience with the PC164C (US$115), which is a 1/3" camera, and a 
Rainbow L163VDC4P 1.6mm lens (US$130), is that meteors are detected to 
about mag 2, with a positional accuracy of about 0.1 degrees. That's 
using Metrec, which only captures at 320x240, half the native resolution 
of the camera. Other software will typically capture at full resolution. 
This setup doesn't quite give all sky coverage, as the horizon is 
clipped a bit in the y-axis. That hasn't been a big concern in our case, 
as cameras are aligned so that the missing areas don't line up with 
other stations. A camera with a 1/2" sensor will have full sky coverage, 
but will cost another US$100 or more.

Additional accuracy can be achieved during post processing by various 
types of data fitting using multiple frames of the event.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Francisco Ocaña" <albireo3000 at yahoo.es>
To: "Global Meteor Observing Forum" <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 1:34 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) Fireball cameras


Hello list,

I´m looking for experiences with cameras used to record fireballs. I
would like to have an all-sky one, but the astrometry precission is not
very good.

So I look for a 1/2" chip to use with a 4-6mm autoiris lens. As it will
be for bright fireballs, it must not be very sensitive (Watec 902,
~600$, is too much), but must have a large field (1/2" chip gives a
field 2,25 times greater than a 1/3" one).

¿Any ideas? Thank you very much!

Paco Ocaña