(meteorobs) Rarity of daylight fireball recordings.

stange34 at sbcglobal.net stange34 at sbcglobal.net
Sat May 17 14:02:52 EDT 2008


Hi Chris,

Your occulting ring(wand) definetly would have merit with an all-sky camera. 
Sun glare & the massive lens artifacts ruin much of the imaging. I will run 
some tests to see how much improvement an occulting disk can provide. 
Certainly would gain a lot of sky surface beneath the sun that a restricted 
view camera could not monitor.

Having a couple of the aforementioned Sony cameras to experiment with, I 
will do glare trials and an IR dome trial with those before moving into my 
only all-sky cam.

Time is not the big problem here....the number of mainframes IS. Too 
many(6). :-)

YCSentinel


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Peterson" <clp at alumni.caltech.edu>
To: "Global Meteor Observing Forum" <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: 2008/05/17 07:42
Subject: Re: (meteorobs) Rarity of daylight fireball recordings.


> There are, of course, as many nighttime earth grazing fireballs as
> daytime. Regardless of the type of fireballs you hope to capture, adding
> daytime surveillance nearly doubles the time you are watching, and
> increases the number of actual captures by something quite a bit less
> than that. All quite worthwhile, of course. You might record a handful
> of daytime events in a year.
>
> You will cut down the captures significantly if you use a narrower FOV
> camera, however. A standard daytime allsky camera design exists, and can
> even be purchased commercially from weather instrument makers. It can
> also be made quite easily. It requires nothing more than modifying an
> ordinary allsky camera to provide a sun occultation disk. You use a
> clock with a 24-hour mechanism to drive a wire and disk around the
> camera, tilted to match the ecliptic. You have to manually adjust the
> tilt every couple of weeks, but otherwise it takes care of itself.
>
> The only other issue with daytime meteor monitoring is that dealing with
> the collected data is more time intensive. There are simply many more
> things in the sky during the day that generate false alarms. Of course,
> that problem could be addressed somewhat with smarter detection
> software. But most code right now isn't much better than simple motion
> detection, and there's a lot moving in the sky during the day.
>
> Chris
>
> *****************************************
> Chris L Peterson
> Cloudbait Observatory
> http://www.cloudbait.com
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <stange34 at sbcglobal.net>
> To: <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
> Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 1:33 AM
> Subject: (meteorobs) Rarity of daylight fireball recordings.
>
>
>> An opportunity might exist to record daylight fireballs, and the
>> larger rare
>> earth grazing fireballs, if standard surveilance cameras (non-all sky)
>> are
>> used in a manner to avoid much of the sunlight with the smaller field
>> of
>> view and CCD chip dimensions which produce rectangular imaging
>> deliberately
>> oriented to minimize solar glare which can mask a fireball.
>>
>> Construction has been started to augment the Sentinel facility here in
>> Northern California using handyavi software for recording, and
>> inexpensive(under $25) Sony 0.1 Lux Hyper HAD model SPT-M124 B/W
>> cameras
>> obtained off of ebay. Most have lenses attached.
>>
>> Others are encouraged to try daylight capture techniques to share
>> solutions
>> to common problems in daylight glare masking & any additional areas of
>> concern.
>>
>> The global search subject of "daylight earth grazing fireballs" on the
>> internet is quite interesting.
>
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