College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's University
All Sky Camera

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About the All-Sky:

The All-Sky 7 is the current camera used to record meteors at the CSB/SJU observatory. The camera itself contains seven highly sensitive NetSurveillance NUT cameras,a SONY STARVIS IMX 291 CMOS Sensor and a 4mm f/1.0 lens. Each camera on the All-Sky 7 combined covers the entire sky to the horizon and is recording meteors and other phenomenon 24/7 at 25fps. This camera was bought and fitted onto the observatory nearly four years after the second All-Sky camera was bought.One of the reasons this happened was because the software (UFO Capture HD2 and UFO AnalyzerV2 ) that was used to collect and analyze the presence of meteors stopped working. This problem with the software started after the original All-sky camera was replaced with the Watec 902H2 Ultimate camera and the Linux computer system which utilized ASGARD to detect and record meteors was changed to the current software. The new software like mentioned before stopped working and produced many false positives of a meteor presence in the sky. Therefore, because of thoes reasons the All-Sky7 was bought to fix the entire system.

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Background

What is a meteor?

A meteor is a streak of light in the sky.That is formed from a meteoroid which is a small piece of an asteroid or a comet in space. When meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere it burns up and eventually vaporizes to form meteors.In some cases the meteoroid remains whole and lands on Earth. Therefore,forming meteorites which vary in size, can land anywhere on Earth and can be made of different materials(stony, metallic and stony metallic).

How often do they occur?

Approximately 25 million meteors enter the atmosphere everyday, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Their speeds can range from 11km/sec to 72km/sec or 25,000mph to 160,000mph. Therefore, due to their fast speeds and constant presence in the Earth's atmosphere, a device such as the All-Sky Camera is used to capture them in the sky and other astronomical phenomena.

Origins of the All-Sky:

The first All-Sky Camera was built by Joshua Novacheck in the summer of 2009 and was used on countless senior thesis to study meteors. The original camera used a program called ASGARD to collect data and IDL programs to analyze the data.The camera was made of a Rainbow L163VDC4P fish eye lens, a Supercircuits PC164CEX low light, black and white. Eventually the first camera was replaced in 2017 by Marty McGuire with a new software. The new software used were UFO Capture HD2 to collect data and UFO AnalyzerV2 to analyze it, which ran on a Windows computer instead of Linux which was the original computer system used. However, as you can imagine that camera did not last very long and was replaced with the All-Sky7 by Jim Crumley in the summer of 2021.

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