All-sky systems

We have recently started experimenting with all-sky lenses on IMX291 based cameras. The results are promising, we get magnitude +2.5 stars at 25 frames per second, and at 720p the all-sky lens gives an average pixel scale of 15 arcmin/px.

Here is how the current setup looks like (we are still working on the dome design):

And here are the detected meteors in one night of observation:

We were also able to perform the astrometric calibration using our universal method, here are the residuals (in pixels) of 15,000 star positions detected throughout the night as the function of the distance from the zenith (in degrees):

As it can be seen, the astrometric residuals are on the order of 0.2 px, although the residuals vary across the range of zenith angles. We consider the quality of this calibration to be satisfactory for computing trajectories of meteorite-dropping fireballs.

Stay tuned!