Knowing our Solar System

The observation of meteor showers -popularly known as meteor showers- is a very important task to answer key questions we still have about the smaller bodies in our Solar System. The spectacular meteor showers that can be seen in the night sky are the product of dust and small rocks entering our lower atmosphere, whose origin lies in the comets -and sometimes asteroids- orbiting the Sun.

Throughout each year there are about 40 showers, being the Quadrantids -January-, Perseids -August- and Geminids -December-, the most relevant. Most meteor showers have been studied and analyzed for years by professional astronomers, but even today new showers continue to be discovered and the predictions of the existing ones are still being improved. Visual observation of these phenomena is a fundamental part of this research, since it is the measurements made by observers from all over the world that make it possible to estimate the temporal evolution of the shower activity rate.

Computational predictions can determine the gravitational influence of the large planets of the Solar System, but it is the visual observations that will finally allow us to check which models are correct and which are not, greatly improving our predictive capacity for the following showers. That is why it is necessary to multiply the observational data, from all points of the Earth.

Therefore, it seems evident that the more "eyes" observing the sky, the better... and during the 365 days of the year.

Infrastructure: All-Sky Cameras

Humans have the need to sleep 😁 and we normally do so at times of darkness, making it difficult to observe the sky when these phenomena occur. Thanks to technological progress, this problem is solved: all-sky cameras.

All-sky cameras are large field cameras that are continuously recording the sky and are usually used to monitor the sky (cloudiness, sky background brightness, ...) and record transient phenomena such as fireballs (very bright meteors).

The project team has a network of allsky cameras distributed throughout Spain, in the Peninsula and the Canary Islands. We are in charge of configuring these cameras to record a video every time an object is detected in the sky, in an automatic and synchronized way.

Scientists need you!

The help of citizens is needed for a very simple task: to analyze the different objects captured by all-sky cameras. Professional astronomers cannot dedicate their time to this task and there is currently no free software that can perform such a task with 100% effectiveness.

The following images are captured by all-sky cameras. It can be seen that some of the videos contain recordings of meteors, but others have mistakenly captured other objects, whether clouds, airplanes or other objects that are not of interest for our study.

What else can we know?

Meteorites provide fundamental information for understanding the formation and evolution of our solar system. However, not all meteors manage to survive their journey and reach the ground. With this experiment we also want to extract more information about the detected objects: their size and their trajectory. The user has the tools to draw the traces on the videos shown. And for what? From a single image it is not possible to calculate the trajectory of a meteor, but if several recordings of the same meteor from different cameras are obtained, it will allow the calculation that could show the approximate coordinates where it will have impacted. In addition, the thicker the meteor, the greater the probability that the object will reach the Earth's surface.

Open dataset

One of the objectives of the project is to elaborate a good dataset that can be used by other researchers for the development of new algorithms to increase the effectiveness rate in detections, for example, making use of Artificial Intelligence techniques such as machine learning. The classified data will be published in an open digital repository.

Come on, can you help up?