Lyrids

Forums Meteors Lyrids

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  • #573161

    Posted by Nick James at 08:20 on 2012 Apr 23

    I managed to catch quite a few Lyrids (and a few sporadics) on my video system on Saturday night/Sunday morning. The weather was pretty good in Chelmsford but with some drifting cloud. It was certainly better than Kelling Heath in Norfolk where I was camping. There we had mainly cloud and heavy rain but there was a gap between 2330 – 0010 when I saw 5 Lyrids in very dark, transparent skies.The brightest event on the video was at 01:55:38. This was almost head-on and massively saturated the camera. It left a short persistent train which lasted for around 10s. The raw video for this event is here in the original MPEG2 and processed WMV format along with some JPEGs of captured events.How did everyone else get on?Nick.

    #575941

    Posted by Callum Potter at 10:21 on 2012 Apr 23

    Some nice meteor captures there Nick.Could you tell us a bit more about your video camera system?Thanks, Callum

    #575942

    Posted by Nick James at 23:09 on 2012 Apr 23

    Callum,There will be a paper on this in the JBAA soon but here is a short summary.The video system consists of a Watec 902H2 Ultimate camera with a 3.8mm, f/0.8 lens in a waterproof, heated CCTV housing. The camera has a field of view of 96×72 deg and is aimed at a point around 45 deg elevation in the SE. Composite video from the camera is digitised by a Hauppage PVR250 hardware MPEG2 encoder card and stored on disk at a rate of around 3GB/hr. The video is analyzed in non real-time by a separate software process which looks for candidate meteor events. This software extracts segments of video around the times of the candidate events for further investigation. The video is standard CCIR TV format, i.e. 720×576 pixels, interlaced, at 50 fields (25 frames) per second.Nick.

    #575943

    Posted by Callum Potter at 16:33 on 2012 Apr 26

    Thanks Nick – look forward to the paper appearing.C.

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