Meteor Tracking

I lead a group of individuals in a project we call the Desert Fireball Array. It consists of 6 video cameras mounted on roofs all over the Tucson area staring at the night sky. The video from each camera is continuously recorded on a computer that always saves the last 5 minutes. When a meteor starts burning in the atmosphere, the bright light triggers the computer to save the previous few minutes and record the fireball until the event is over. When we have more than two cameras simultaneously record the same event, we can triangulate the meteors trajectory that is then loaded into Google Earth and visualized in 3D. This allows us to calculate the zone where the meteor landed (if it's big enough).

We have tracked many meteors but none were thought to have hit the ground. We are still waiting.....

 events smlcam2c smlClipMask sml