All-Sky Meteor Camera
What it measures
Meteor detections with trajectory data, velocity, and orbital elements. Spectroscopy of brighter events for compositional analysis.
An all-sky camera for Nepal's meteor sky
An all-sky meteor camera is a fixed, upward-pointing camera with a fisheye lens that watches the entire night sky at once and automatically detects the brief streaks of meteors. Paired with a second camera some distance away, the same meteor seen from two viewpoints can be triangulated in three dimensions — recovering its speed, altitude, and the orbit it came from. This is HICS's first node for the Global Meteor Network (GMN).
From a streak of light to an orbit
1 · Fisheye optics + IMX291 sensor ▸
A wide fisheye lens images the whole sky onto a sensitive Sony IMX291 low-light sensor, capturing the night sky continuously.
2 · RMS detection software ▸
The open-source RMS (Raspberry Pi Meteor Station) software runs on a Raspberry Pi, automatically detecting meteor streaks frame-by-frame and logging each event with a precise timestamp.
3 · Triangulation ▸
When two or more stations record the same meteor, its three-dimensional path is triangulated from the different viewing angles — giving real height and velocity, not just a 2-D streak.
4 · Orbits and flux to the network ▸
From the trajectory and speed, the meteoroid's original orbit around the Sun is reconstructed. Detections, orbits, and flux statistics feed back to the Global Meteor Network.
Why a grain of sand makes a streak of light
Meteoroids enter the atmosphere at 11–72 km/s. Even a sand-grain-sized particle carries enormous kinetic energy at those speeds — energy that goes into heating and ablating the grain, which excites the surrounding air to glow:
This camera is the instrument behind HICS's Meteor Astronomy research programme — Nepal's first presence in the Global Meteor Network, from a geographic gap with near-zero coverage.
Planned. No camera is deployed yet — this page describes the design. The first station establishes Nepal's node in the network.
