Meteor camera

[james_screech]

Having recently upgraded my planetary camera from a DFK31 to a ASI120MM I've been wondering what to do with the DFK31.

I've been thinking of turning it into a meteor imaging system, I've bought a 2.1mm CCTV lens for it and am in the process of building a simple enclosure to protect it from the weather. Has anyone else built / experimented with a similar system?

I was wondering about what exposure to use for capturing bright meteors / fireballs, either long 10sec exposures (360 frames per hour) or short 1/10sec exposures (36000 frames per hour)? The former will produce less data to search through for meteors but that latter will give some information on the objects speed.

Due to limited disk space on the computer I will be using the I cannot save a full night's images from short exposures so will need software that only saves frames with candidate meteors, does such software exist that will work with this camera?

If I use longer exposures is there any software that will automatically search for meteors in a captured .avi file?

James

[ChrisLX200]

I made an enclosure a while back for a redundant QHY5-II, with a similar objective. http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/208185-qhy5l-ii-as-an-all-sky-camera/?hl=+all#entry2236503 However more recently I managed to snag a Minitron Starlight camera (12V6HC-EX Mono) off ebay and that has replaced it for use as a meteor camera. The Minitron (or a Watec WAT-902H2 Ultimate) is a better alternative - more sensitive and runs at 30fps at whatever sensitivity you choose. It's larger than the QHY5-II though and requires a video adapter, easily sorted with a capture 'cable' though which isn't expensive. Anyway, the QHY5-II was doing a reasonable job with exposures around 1sec IIRC, and the software I use is HandyAVI which comes in several flavours - the version I use is the Astronomy one which has meteor recording. You can set the sensitivty of movement detection and it will record only while movement is detected (plus a defined number of frames before and after the event). It does save massively on disk space. That software does work best with a video input though.

ChrisH

[drmillrace]

+1 for the HandyAVI software. I use this for meteor detection with a Samsung SDC435 running through a capture card and it works very well.  I also tried the software it in daylight with my recently acquired ZWO ASI120mm and it seemed to work ok detecting my hand waved about in front of the lens but I haven't had a chance to try for real under dark skies. 

[michaelmorris]

Another thumbs up for HandyAvi software. The motion detection algorithms are pretty good. On a really good night (last years Perseids), I ended up with around 65 x 5 to 9 second videos, 50 of which were meteors. On a poor night, you could easily end up with 100 x 4 to 10 second videos of aircraft and clouds. Even then, the great still image composite generated by HandyAvi means you just scroll through 100 jpegs in image previewer to see if there are any of interest first. This takes about 5 minutes.