The Ochra South Observatory consists of a Sandia Bolide Detection Camera and propriatry Sentinel software running under Linux. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Richard Spalding of Sandia National Laboratories USA for providing the camera and software free of charge.
The camera unit itself is a Sony HB-710E super low lux (0.0005 lux) 1/2" B&W 768x494 pixel CCD with a Rainbow L163VDC4P fisheye lens with a 180 degree field of view. The camera assembly is mounted in a 6" diameter heavy duty plastic pipe with a clear perspex dome. The camera housing also contains a power supply, a thermostatically controlled heating element and fan to prevent the perspex dome fogging up. With the addition of a couple of plywood flanges the camera unit can be mounted inside a disused chimney pot with power and signal cables running down the flue to the room below.
NB - these photos are by
Jeff Brower of his Sentinel camera in BC... as I forgot to take any shots of mine before putting it up on the roof! However, mine is exactly the same
A
Hauppauge WinTV Go Plus PCI card is used as a frame grabber to convert the analogue camera signal into a digital image. The original Sentinel software package that came with the Sandia Bolide Detection Camera runs under Linux, and although it works, it has its limitations. It requires a dedicated Linux box to monitor the camera, and at present is unable to compress the captured movie files. This results in the hard disk filling up very quickly with multi-megabyte and occasionally gigabyte files.
I am experementing with using a Windows based package called
HandiAVI which is capable of capturing both meteor/bolide events and time-lapse movies simultaneously from the same camera input. This can be very useful if, like me, you wish to monitor local light pollution and sky glow as well as capture bolide events at the same time. I am working closely with the developer of HandiAVI to improve the functionality of the software. I am running HandiAVI on an old Pentium II laptop under Windows 2000, which is more power efficient than running it on a desktop PC.
The laptop is used solely as a capture device, with a
Hauppauge WinTV USB device to create standard avi movie files, which are compressed on the fly by HandiAVI. Each morning the resulting avi file for the previous night is downloaded onto my main laptop via the houses' internal network and analysed using another function of HandiAVI. Bolide events can be analysed frame by frame to examint the exact time and point of appearance, direction and duration.
The resulting AVI video files are then grabbed, via the internal house network, onto my main laptop for analysis and storage. With this setup it should be possible to capture not just bright fireballs and bolides, but also dimmer shooting stars, Iridium flares, the ISS/Shuttle and any other transitory phenomena in the sky. Time lapse photography is also possible, and I hope to also adapt the bolide camera to detect cloud cover, sky glow from light pollution and general sky conditions.
Getting the camera into the chimney pot was a life threatening experience! With a precipitous drop on either side, I had to shimmy along the ridge tiles on my very tall roof, risking serious damage to the Crown Jewels! The north side of the roof was slick with moisture and algae making a fall totally unstoppable if I slipped! Scary monsters!!
I will post up interesting bolide events on this site as I capture them.
Watch this space!
Above: Night time image with nearly full moon.
