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Welcome to the Global Meteor Network's wiki page!

The Global Meteor Network (GMN) is a world wide organization of amateur and professional astronomers alike, whose goal is to observe the night sky using low-light video cameras and produce meteor trajectories in a coordinated manner. Here you will find information on the purpose and structure of the GMN, assembling and operating your own meteor camera, contributing to the development of RMS the GMN software, as well as information on how your observations as a citizen scientist can contribute to the further understanding of our solar system's formation and evolution.

Global Meteor Network Overview

Our mission. [1]

A brief history of the Croatian Meteor Network. [2]

Some 'live' GMN data products. [3]

Meteor Detection Station

What do I need? [4]

How do I obtain a camera? [5]

Can I us a commercial all-sky camera?

  Generally not due to the lack of sensitivity. But see this recent experiment. [6]

How do I assemble my GMN station? [7]

A detailed tutorial on how to perform astrometry and photometry calibration in SkyFit. [8]

What can I do with my GMN station?

Tracking and determining fireball trajectory using two or more stations. [9]

Generating a Google Earth KML file to show your station's field of view. [10]

Using UFO Orbit program to estimate meteor trajectories. [11]

Urban meteor observing. [12]

IP camera setup

Quick start guide

Focusing your IP camera

Configuring your IMX291 IP camera

Do it yourself (DIY) RMS Installation

Please note that images are available of RMS software pre-installed into Raspbian. Raspbian is the operating system typically used on the Raspberry Pi (RPi) computer. In most cases, there is no need to install RMS into Raspbian yourself, because it is much easier to use the most recent RMS Raspbian image. The current publicly released image of RMS pre-installed into the Jessie Raspbian release is here: [13]

This Jessie RMS image is well suited to the RPi hardware version 3+ or earlier, although use of v1 is not recommended.

Work is underway to make a Buster Raspbian release RMS image intended for the RPi v4 hardware, and we hope to have this image available soon. It is being tested now, and should be ready for release in a few weeks. We recommend the RPi v4 with 2 or 4 GB of RAM for Buster RMS.

Many station operators find that a 128 GB microSD card is preferred, although smaller 64 GB cards will also work. The image is flashed to the microSD card using the Etcher utility for Windows, which can be found here: [14]

Please note that the pre-installed RMS software images incorporate an auto- updating feature, so that the RMS software is updated to the current release whenever your Raspberry Pi RMS is booted. This way, your station is always running the most recent set of updates. For installations into other Linux or windows environments, executing the command: git pull will update to the most recent RMS release.

The code was designed to run on a RPi, but it will also run an some Linux distributions. We have tested it on Linux Mint 18 and Ubuntu 16. For information on installing into other Linux releases, check portions of the section listed below for installing on RPi, and also check installation instructions found on:[15]

DIY for Raspberry Pi.Raspberry Pi

DIY for Windows (Note: Capture and detection will not work under Windows).Windows (NOTE: Capture and detection will not work under Windows)

Usage

Quick start guide

Video tutorials

Astrometric and photometric calibration: SkyFit

Manually reducing meteors: Manual Reduction

IstraStream

GMN status website

IstraStream Plots Explanation

For More Information

Contact the Global Meteor Network [16]

Join the Global Meteor Network Forum [17]