(meteorobs) meteor app

[Jodie Reynolds]

Hello Terry,

40-65 degrees normally, 120 degrees if you throw a "wide angle fisheye" over the lens, but doing that also impacts sensitivity, which is the big issue.

My LG Esteem w/5mpixel imager module can't see the Mag 0 "finder stars".  I'm not sure what it would take, it can see the moon (blown out), it can't see Mag 0 or -1.  And that's with its slowest shutter which would be reaaally smeared.

I'm not sure why there's a need for crowd-sourcing this.  Searching video for streaks is trivially easy for machine vision.  Trace it back and find the radiant, if it's part of a known shower, there you go.  Otherwise - it's not, flag it for a human.

Pretty much any calculation can be done on-the-fly if you have the imaging chain calibrated and your shutter is reasonably fast.

The moon is blowing out the entire western sky, but here's my bolide camera at this moment, and the entire thing, including the computer, camera, imager, etc. is around 2/3 the price of my phone... [http://www.spaceballoon.org/bolide-cam-v3-lyrid2.png]

Last night it flagged some really faint trails, nothing worth writing home about really, but there's enough of them that I'll go through them after the shower's over with.  And we've only got a couple good hours between moonset and sunrise this year.  And it's still a work-in-progress, I'm already working on the next firmware version.

Anyway - a cellphone wouldn't be where I'd be focusing my energy.

--- Jodie


Sunday, April 21, 2013, 8:55:58 PM, you wrote:


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)
 





-- 
Best regards,
 Jodie                            mailto:spacerocks at spaceballoon.org