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Introduction
In the spring of 2019, I joined the New Mexico Meteor Array (NMMA). This a collaborative project to observe and record meteors with cameras pointed at the night sky. The NMMA is part of a nascent effort working toward global coverage through a organization called, logically enough, the Global Meteor Network (globalmeteornetwork.org).
The NMMA consists of about 20 computer-operated sky cameras located between Santa Fe and Socorro that are all watching for meteors in the sky above and around Albuquerque. My camera is mounted on the roof of my home in Santa Fe and aimed toward the west. The field of view covers an area from the west side of Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, Bernalillo, Jemez Mountains, Los Alamos and northwestern New Mexico out to a range of about 100 miles from Santa Fe.
The NMMA has already made a contribution to meteor science. It was predicted that the earth might pass through a dust trail left by Comet 209P/Linear on May 24, 2019 when it passed this way in 1939, 1994 or 2009 (the dust trails of all three passes are very close together). The cameras in our network detected several meteors associated with the comet, confirming the prediction.
How it works
Each night, after sunset, the camera is automatically activated and begins recording the night sky. When a meteor is detected, a video clip of the meteor is saved on the computer. After sunrise, the computer processes the accumulated video clips and creates an image of every meteor detected during the night. The computer knows exactly where it is located and exactly where it is pointed and calculates the position of the beginning, end and track of the meteor in the sky. Most meteors result when a random space rock enters the earth’s atmosphere and burns up in the atmosphere before reaching the earth’s surface. These are called “sporadic” meteors. But during the earth’s annual orbit around the sun, there are several well known “meteor showers” that occur when the earth passes through a stream or trail of dust and rock left by a passing comet. To an observer on the ground, the visible tracks of the meteors associated with these debris trail all point back to a specific location on a map of the sky that is the point of origin of the meteors. This location is called the “radiant” because the meteors appear to “radiate” from that point.
Meteor Videos
An added benefit is that the system now generates a timelapse video of everything that the camera saw during the night. So now you can see what happened last night over a wide swath of New Mexico while you (and I) were sleeping. Some of things you’ll see are clouds, the moon and stars moving across the sky during the night, of course. Airplanes appear as fast-moving continuous light trails across the screen. Meteors are very brief streaky flashes. Satellites are small dots moving slowly across the screen, sometimes flashing because as they spin, their solar panels reflect sunlight back toward earth. Sometimes even bats and flying insects are captured in the video.
Figure Caption: The Stack Image
From the individual meteor images, the computer creates a stack or composite image of all the meteors detected during the night. Images of meteors tend to have sharp ends because the meteor gradually gets hot enough to glow as it enters and then gradually burns up high (80-120km) in the atmosphere. Sometimes the camera captures an airplane together with a meteor. Airplanes tend to look like a string of lights. Sometimes you can see images of flying insects, birds and bats moving randomly about the image. The rotation of the planet is revealed by the diagonal dotted lines that are images of the stars in the field of view of the camera that were captured with the meteors during the night.
Figure Caption: Radiant Image
The radiant image shows the sky map with the meteor tracks and their projected point of origin in the sky or radiant. At the bottom of the graph is a legend that shows the known dust trails that the earth encounters during the course of the year. The red-dashed vertical line indicates which known dust trails the earth is currently passing through.
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