Morning twilight fireball - 19 Feb 10 - 06:36am

30 Jan 2010 Fireballs

These two clips are compressed down from 47.5 and 170Mb each. The quality has necessarily suffered a bit!

New PC Hardware

I have upgraded the capture PC to a 2.4GHz box that I rescued off a skip. After hosing out the insides and replacing the PSU, which had gone futt, it works perfectly. The postage on the new (second hand) PSU cost more than the PSU itself - a bargain!

New Capture Software

I've been using HandiAVI to watch the sky and capture bolide and meteor events, and it has worked well up to a point. The problem with HandiAVI is that it can not discriminate between the bright flash of a meteor and a bright cloud moving across the sky. The result was that although it would successfully capture meteors and bolides burning up in the atmosphere... it also recorded Gigabytes of nice fluffy clouds drifting across the night sky. Not ideal.

So... out with the excrable HandiAVI and in (on a trial basis) with SonotoCo's UFO-Capture and UFO-Analyse suite. I've been running this since the beginning of 2010 and so far, so good. UFO-Capture seems to do an excellent job of ignoring clouds and aircraft... though I notice that it also seems to ignore every Iridium flare, which makes me wonder if it's missing some meteor/bolide events. Some fine tuning is in order, me thinks. The only down-side I see with the new software is that after 30 days you have to cough up around €150 for a single-user licence. Needs must, I guess.