(meteorobs) meteor app

Stuart McDaniel actionshooting at carolina.rr.com
Mon Apr 22 22:31:40 EDT 2013


Where do you get this app?


*****************************
Stuart McDaniel
Lawndale, NC
Secr.,
Cleve. Co. Astronomical Society

IMCA #9052
Sirius Meteorites

Node35 - Sentinel All Sky

http://spacerocks.weebly.com

*********************************

From: Terry Johnson
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2013 11:55 PM
To: 'Meteor science and meteor observing'
Subject: (meteorobs) meteor app


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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