Help please with technical problem

[michaelmorris]

I’ve an unusual technical problem I’m trying to solve.  Can you help?

The Background

A few weeks ago I installed a WATEC 902-based meteor video camera on the back wall of my house.  All seemed to be working fine for the first few days.  Since then I’ve had problems which are difficult to diagnose.  The camera is only recording one or two meteors a night even though meteor activity as recorded on my wide field set up has remained relatively high.  This is lowering of recorded meteor activity has been coincident with the capture software (UFOCapture) recording several captures of video of flashes across all or part of the screen either preceded or followed by a blank screen.  I suspect that this may be caused by an intermittent the video signal. 

To me the mostly likely cause would be the camera turning on and off. This would explain the signal spike being recorded just before or after the blank screen.

I’m trying to test this hypothesis and find out how bad the problem is.  This might give me a clue to the cause.

The Plan

The plan I’ve come up with is to install a light of some type in the front of the lens that turns itself on for about 1 or 2 second every ten minutes.  This should be recorded as a possible meteor and be captured by UFO capture.  The time stamp will tell me when the video was recorded and hence looking through all the captures should tell me if the software has failed to record any (and how many) of the light pulses. 

So here are my questions:

Does this sound like a reasonable plan?

Has anyone know how I could quickly and simply generate a 1 to 2 second pulse of light once every ten minutes?

Has anyone any ideas on a simpler/better method for investigating this problem?

Thanks

[pete_l]

You could try flashing a green laser across the FOV - if you can be sure you won't accidentally blind anyone or shoot down any airliners.

However, my experience with an LN300 All Sky Cam is that it is good for integrating the light of slowly moving stars, but it's remarkably insensitive to fast moving meteors. I had it active during the Perseids and to be blunt, it was lousy. There were many occasions where I would see meteors but the camera recorded nothing, or only the faintest of trails.

The software I use is called Chronolapse and it's just a general purpose timelapse recorder I use my camera with a 10 second integration time and I save an image every 10 seconds, so I shouldn't be missing anything. I do get a few aircraft trails showing up and a few bright satellites, so it does detect moving targets. The only downside is that you have to visually inspect every frame (of the 2,000-ish each night) manually.

[michaelmorris]

I've considered the manual approach but I was trying to avoid staying up all night to carry out a test.

[michaelmorris]

I think I've just worked out a much simpler solution. Set up dslr pointing at the computer screen and use an interval timer to take a snap of the computer screen every ten minutes.

[michaelmorris]

Even simpler solution found - use ' Timesnapper' software to do a screen grab every 5 minutes.

[michaelmorris]

It worked a treat. Camera didn't turn off all night. I'll run it for another two nights just to check.