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Re: (meteorobs) Hello all
Hi Cary,
> ginned up at work. We've coupled an Image intensifier to a high res
> camera and we are able to record at real time down to magnitude 8.0 On
> our first night we recorded several sporadics and several perseids. We
> have an animted gif of a meteor recording posted on our web site as well
> as information about the system - come take a look at
> http://www.foothilldot net/~star/newscitech/starlite.html We're working on
> interfacing the camera system to a computer via real time video capture
> so the we may to real time sky monitoring - i.e. meteor counts etc...
I had a look at your website and studied the information you give there
and the demo clip. I have a number of questions and comments:
* Why is the field of fiew completely unfocussed near the edges? Is it the
image intensifier that produces such a bad image, or is it the coupling
lens with a very short focal length? If the latter is the case you should
definitely use another lenses with a longer focal length, since this
may greatly improve the image.
* What type of image intensifier are you using. It's a gen II device I
suppose? American or Russian production?
* 8 mag at a fov of 5 deg is not too much. It may be ok for satellite
tracking and NEO search, but the field of view is quite tiny for meteor
observation. Maybe you can record many sporadics, but the number of
'ordinary' shower meteors will be limited. The reason has been
discussed on this list before: The fainter the average meteor you record,
the higher the percentage of sporadics (due to their large population
index). In the visual domain shower meteors may be dominant, but in the
telescopic range the sporadics outperform most showers.
* What type of software are you developing for meteor orbit calculation?
How do you intend to detect meteors in the video data stream and measure
their position? The second problem is much more important in my opinion.
I've a pile of unanalyzed video tapes at home, but there is no way to
extract the meteor data, since finding and measuring the meteors manually
is extremely time-consuming.
Pete Gural and me have been working hard on this topic for quite
some time and developed automatic detection software, and I can tell you
that this is something which is not coded between lunch and dinner. ;-)
* Finally the price of $895 seems reasonable to me if you manage to
overcome the problems I mentioned above.
Best regards, Sirko
PS: I'll be off now for the solar eclipse and the Perseids until August
24, so I will not be able to continue this thread until then.
--
**************************************************************************
* Dipl.-Inform. Sirko Molau * *
* RWTH Aachen, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik VI * __ *
* Ahornstr. 55, D-52056 Aachen, Germany * " 2B v 2B " *
* * *
* phone: +49-241-8021615 * Shakespeare *
* fax : +49-241-8888219 * *
* email: molau@informatik.rwth-aachendot de * *
**************************************************************************
* www : http://www.informatik.rwth-aachendot de/I6/Colleagues/molau *
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