Five Years in the Building of the

Saskatchewan Fireball Camera Network

Gordon E. Sarty

University of Saskatchewan

Saskatoon, Canada

The network as it (almost) is today

The beginning: Oct. 30, 1993, Western Canada Fireball

Lots and lots (70) visual observations collected by telephone by Richard Huziak.

I wrote some software to compute the flight-path and orbit of the fireball. [Huziak and Sarty, JRASC, 88, 332-351, 1994]

Wouldn’t it be great if I could to this automatically?

The breakthrough: free stuff from Richard Spalding of SANDIA Labs

Parts arrived ca. 2005

Assembled 2 fisheye cameras in my garage

Later (2008?) I got an older Sandia mirror camera from Rick – it is now in Winnipeg.

The first detected meteor Used a sentinel box

Had summer student Andy Salisbury tinker with the camera to get it working

Videos played with sdisplay

First video here Sept. 2, 2006

Beginning of nearly continuous monitoring of the Saskatoon sky – interrupted twice by Physics Building renovations…

Nice but I wanted to get the data to my software so I could compute trajectories and orbits.

Switch to Rob Weryk’s ASGARD, 2007

• Viking sky place• Or sci-fi aliens?

The first computed orbit

Saskatoon Detections: 2006 - 2009

Camera

Setup Start Date

End Date

Clear Time (hrs)

Mainly Clear Time (hrs)

Mostly Cloudy Time (hrs)

Net Time (hrs)

No. of Meteors

Meteor Rate (hr-1)

fireball02

Sentinel

19/09/2006

23/06/2008

1224.75

1614.5 1123 2144.3 164 0.076

fireball03

Asgard 22/06/2007

19/02/2009

1206 1339 935 1969 563 0.286

fireball04

Asgard 23/07/2008

14/02/2009

NA NA NA 822.5 640 0.778

• The camera of fireball02 = fireball04 but the computer/software running the camera is different

• Based on work dome by Neil Johnson for an undergrad research project• fireball04 was moved to Lucky Lake in February 2009• “Mainly clear” ~ 50% cloud cover, “Mostly cloudy” ` 90% cloud cover, “Clear” = no

cloud cover. Based on Environmental Canada data• For fireball4, the fraction of sky visible was estimated from the hourly calibration

frames• Net time is observing time weighted by fraction of sky visible• I trim false positives from the data every morning as I read my e-mail

Photometric mass distribution

• Not the final result! The masses are too small, there is an order of magnitude error in the absolute flux determination.

• Corrections to the absolute value of the photometric mass needs to be done

• Distribution shape is correct • Flux calibration done via the stars visible in representative

calibration frames• Photometric mass x velocity2 x efficiency = integrated intensity

Installation of the Lucky Lake camera: fireball04

•Installed February, 2009 on Tenho Tuomi’s roof

•The most reliable camera on the network

The Winnipeg camera: fireball1

•Met Larry Gundrum while searching for Buzzard Coulee meteroites

•Installed, May, 2009 on Larry’s roof in Winnipeg

•No coincident detections yet

The Dauphin camera: fireball7

• An Impact Model 40396 video amp/splitter divides camera output between two computers

• Fireball7 runs Asgard, the other computer runs Sonota UFO software

• Splitters can allow us to add existing cameras to a network without interrupting their existing functionality

• Hooked into Ron Lupack’s existing allsky camera on his roof

• 1st event into io on January, 2011• Ron sent me his old computer, I

installed debian and Asgard• Getting the internet connection to

all me to ssh in is always tricky

The Yorkton camera: fireball6

• Operated by Jim Huziak (Rick’s brother)• Installed on a school roof• Connecting to internet failed – school IT

person severely messed up the computer

• Jim set the computer back to me – reinstall – maybe a new location?

The Regina camera: fireball5

• Martin Beech above• His camera is identical to the Yorkton

Camera – one of the three from Richard Spalding to Martin, ca. 2000?

• Waiting for Campion College to hook up internet… (been waiting for over a year)

• Currently on the old VCR system

Buzzard Coulee detection!

November 28, 2008

•From Saskatoon (fireball4 before it went to Lucky Lake)

Picking up meteoritesWinter 2008Spring 2009Fall 2010

Ellen Milley Tenho Rick

A man out standing in his field.

Fireballs in Dauphin but not Winnipeg

July 11, 2011

July 14, 2011 April 6, 2011

January 19, 2011

A recent event over B.C. – from Lucky Lake

May 14, 2011

A recent event in B.C. – from Cranbrook, B.C.

May 14, 2011

Video from Rick Nowell, College of the Rockies, Cranbrook, BC

Let’s Network!

Image from James Whitehead’s web site: http://www.allsky.ca/