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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.

Meteor Detection Station

What is it?

<<In progress>>

How do I obtain a camera?

Build my own camera system

<<In Progress>>

Can I use a commercial all-sky camera?

  Generally no due to the lack of sensitivity. But see this recent experiment

Operating and maintaining your station

Overview

Please note that GMS is a nascent operation and you may share some growing pains if you choose to be involved -- we're still working out some bugs and making improvements here, which may be an opportunity to help if you have programming skills! ;-) So note that the workload of day-to-day operation can be non-zero, and might take a little bit of your time.

Ideally, you'll want to monitor your RMS RPi system(s) daily to look for freezes or glitches or other problems... like birds nesting or soiling the camera window, people accidentally unplugging the power cord, mice (or cats or dogs!) chewing on the camera Ethernet cable, etc.

Although we are getting close, this is not a "power up and forget about it" system yet. However, by its very nature, the GMS network is inhabited by a lot of people who are willing to help newcomers getting started. So, here are some clues for daily operation of your RMS camera:

Daily Operations

You can operate your RPi4-based meteor camera from a keyboard/mouse/monitor directly connected to the Raspberry Pi 4, or you can operate it remotely with a headless RPi4.

Connecting to your RMS camera over the internet (Headless system). Most people will eventually want to be able to monitor and run their systems from their primary computer…

Archiving data and backing up configuration

Data backup is as much or as little as you like. Your primary data is automatically uploaded to a central server every morning when data processing is done. We've built some automated tools that can help to back up any additional data to a thumb drive inserted into the RPi.

Tools and Utilities

<<In progress>>

Optional RMS Software Installation

Flash a pre-built image

Please note: 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

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

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 GitHub