The meteor detection system comprises of the following equipment:
Hardware Summary
2 x PC Systems (Custom Builds)
1 x Canopus ADVC-55 Analogue to Digital Video Converter
1 x Powerware 5110 700VA USB 420W Line Interactive UPS
1 x Aviosys IP Power 9258 Network Power Controller
1 x Astrovid Fireball Meteor Detection Camera
Software Summary
2 x Microsoft Windows 7 64Bit
1 x UFO Capture V2 (setting details further below)
1 x UFO Analyzer V2
System Architecture
The system architecture is shown below including the roles and responsibilities of each device. Red lines denote power and green lines denote data.
System Timing Diagram
The following diagram shows how each device turns on and off relative to each other. Note that there is some slack from when the IP9258 power switch turns on until UFO Capture starts to detect meteors. Likewise there is some slack between the time that UFO Capture turns off the PC to when the IP9258 power switch turns off. This is because the IP9258 power switch runs on its own internal schedule and is not aware of the sunset and sunrise times like UFO Captures is.
UFO Capture Settings
Following is how UFO Capture is configured for the Meteor Hunter system.
Input TAB
Note that on the Input TAB, the 'Optional Triggers' has been set to a time interval of 120min. This basically causes the system to take a video (and consequently send me an thumbnail-email) every 2hrs. I call this my 'weather shot' and helps to determine the sky conditions during analysis. This helps avoid the situation where the weather is bad, and no captures are received for a night. I can therefore check the weather shots, and if all the weather shots are cloudy (as is often the case in Melbourne) we know that the likely cause was bad sky conditions.
Operation TAB
Capture Schedule
Profile TAB
DB TAB
Detection Settings
