The Global Meteor Network – Methodology and first results

Abstract

The Global Meteor Network (GMN) utilizes highly sensitive low-cost CMOS video cameras which run open-source meteor detection software on Raspberry Pi computers. Currently, over 450 GMN cameras in 30 countries are deployed. The main goal of the network is to provide long-term characterization of the radiants, flux, and size distribution of annual meteor showers and outbursts in the optical meteor mass range. The rapid 24-h publication cycle the orbital data will enhance the public situational awareness of the near-Earth meteoroid environment. The GMN also aims to increase the number of instrumentally observed meteorite falls and the transparency of data reduction methods. A novel astrometry calibration method is presented which allows decoupling of the camera pointing from the distortion, and is used for frequent pointing calibrations through the night. Using wide-field cameras (88° × 48°) with a limiting stellar magnitude of +6.0 ± 0.5 at 25 frames per second, over 220 000 precise meteoroid orbits were collected since 2018 December until 2021 June. The median radiant precision of all computed trajectories is 0.47°, 0.32° for $\sim 20{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of meteors which were observed from 4 + stations, a precision sufficient to measure physical dispersions of meteor showers. All non-daytime annual established meteor showers were observed during that time, including five outbursts. An analysis of a meteorite-dropping fireball is presented which showed visible wake, fragmentation details, and several discernible fragments. It had spatial trajectory fit errors of only ∼40 m, which translated into the estimated radiant and velocity errors of 3 arcmin and tens of meters per second.

Realistic gravitational focusing of meteoroid streams

“…The Global Meteor Network Vida et al (2016Vida et al ( , 2018a. The initial astrometric calibration is manually performed for all stations using the GAIA DR2 star catalog (Prusti et al 2016;Brown et al 2018).…”

“…1 (GMN) is a video meteor network of stations using low-cost internet protocol (IP) cameras and Raspberry Pi single-board computers running open source software(Vida et al 2019a). As of late 2019, there are more than 150 GMN cameras in 20 countries.…”

Estimating trajectories of meteors: an observational Monte Carlo approach – II. Results

“…(ii) A moderate field of view CCD video system typical of CAMS (Jenniskens et al 2011), SonotaCo 1 , the Croatian Meteor Network (Gural & Šegon 2009), and the Global Meteor Network (Vida et al 2019a).…”

Computing optical meteor flux using Global Meteor Network data

“…The Global Meteor Network (GMN) is an amateur-professional collaboration project with over 600 video meteor cameras in more than 30 countries (Vida et al 2021). The GMN uses low-cost consumergrade security cameras which are a good match to the sensitivity and field of view of a human observer.…”

“…This method assumes that meteors are the brightest objects visible in a sub-area of the frame for a period on the order of seconds. The algorithm then compresses blocks of 256 video frames into 4 images: a per-pixel maximum stack, an image where the frame index of pixel maximum occurrence is encoded as pixel level, a per-pixel average stack, and per-pixel standard deviation image (Vida et al 2021). At the normal GMN frame rate of 25 frames per second each 256-frame block has a duration of 10.24 seconds.…”