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, , 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 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: CameraSetupStart Date End Date Clear Time (hrs) Mainly Clear Time (hrs) Mostly Cloudy Time (hrs) Net Time (hrs) No. of Meteors Meteo r Rate (hr -1 ) fireball 02 Sentinel19/09/ /06/ fireball 03 Asgard22/06/ /02/ fireball 04 Asgard23/07/ /02/ 2009 NA 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

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 velocity 2 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 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 1 st 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 meteorites Winter 2008 Spring 2009 Fall 2010 Ellen Milley Tenho Rick A man out standing in his field.

Fireballs in Dauphin but not Winnipeg July 11, 2011 July 14, 2011April 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: