(meteorobs) OT-Possible single station determination of

[stange]

Thank you Peter.

Interesting research work you are doing. Unfortunately, living in the City 
proper restricts the distances I have available at the present time.

An alternative that might be more practicle for me(and others) is to devise 
a means of real-time imaging with live cameras at a distance through a 
"near-wireless" system using computer linking on DSL. I understand this kind 
of hardware is very expensive, but I believe those costs will eventually be 
driven down as competitors continue to develop their own products for the 
market. Something to look forward too. :-)

Thank you again Peter for the information.

Larry
YCS

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gural, Peter S." <PETER.S.GURAL at saic.com>
To: <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: 2008/12/18 10:17
Subject: Re: (meteorobs) OT-Possible single station determination of


> Larry;
>
> I must agree with much of what Chris has indicated in the previous posts
> on this subject. However, there is an alternative which may or may not
> appeal to you. It turns out an IOTA occultation observer named Scott
> Degenhardt had laid out a series of NARROW field of view imagers (approx
> 2 degree FOV), separated by just a few kilometers, and pointing at low
> elevation angle. This was done to measure the physical width of an
> asteroid via stellar occultation timing. He serendipitously collected
> the same meteor in the video record of 5 cameras and because of the
> narrow FOV (high angular resolution of the focal plane) we were able to
> determine trajectory (thus range) quite easily with just a few kilometer
> separation. I am working with him on a paper for the Journal of the IMO
> but it raises the prospects for what I would call short baseline, narrow
> FOV imaging for meteors.
>
> Now before you get too excited, the flux rate goes down because of the
> narrow FOV which would have been compensated for by the design Scott
> came up with that achieved better than +10 mag limiting "stellar"
> magnitude for very low cost, but... the angular velocity trailing losses
> across the focal plane because the meteor is whipping along at a lot of
> pixels per frame, drives down the number of meteors you can see. I am
> working on the optimal pointing and separation for such a system before
> we go to press on the article. Thus, it is not a great system for
> determining fireball distances in large FOV systems. Your best bet there
> is the suggestion by Chris to separate the pair of imagers by tens of
> kilometers.
>
> Pete Gural
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