(meteorobs) meteor app

Terry Johnson tenacious at cyberback.com
Sun Apr 21 23:55:58 EDT 2013


Here's something new!

 

http://spaceappschallenge.org/project/falling-star-finder/

 

 

.

Quote from the page:  

 

"A mobile phone, sitting on the ground, will take many back-to-back
long-exposure images of the sky to capture meteor trails and passing
satellites. After the observing session, the user can upload all their
photos to a server for other people to find meteors in, or the photographer
can locally find their own meteors before upload.

Anyone can download un-traced photos into the app to join in the process!

When tracing, you look for an image with a white streak, then trace the
meteor trail onscreen, and align the photo with an overlaid star field. That
creates the precise celestial coordinate dimensions of the sky streak. The
photo will have the vector streak coordinates embedded right in the EXIF
tags with the location and time, and will be uploaded to the server. 

The server will match photos from other observers within the same viewing
area, and use the pythagorean theorem to find the latitude, longitude and
altitude of the meteor or satellite trail. The orbit can be calculated then,
and the resulting orbit plot and ephemeris data appear on the website and
alerts the users who took the photos and traced the trails."

.

 

But how well could this work?  What's the field of view of a typical
smartphone?  Do reference stars even show?  The whole crowdsourcing aspect
is really exciting, though.  Could make the job of calculating ZHR, radiant
size, average mag., etc., automatic.

 

--Terry, who only posts something every year or so.  :o)

 

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