This is the smallest of our 'observatories'. We are now operating 6 all sky cameras in the Tucson area. Our group is known as the Desert Fireball Array and our goal is to detect, characterize and recover a meteor from a fireball event over Tucson. A small video camera with a wide angle lens feeds a video stream to a computer which continuously records the night sky. When a meteor event happens, the computer saves the previous few minutes and continues recording until the event is over.
When an incoming meteor is detected by at lease two of the cameras, we are able to triangulate the trajectory through the atmosphere. The data is then translated into Google Earth to see the meteor path in three dimensions. This allows the calculation of strewn field if the meteor was thought to hit the ground.
Spectroscopy is an important part of the analysis. Here one ouf our cameras caught a bright meteor and we were able to obtain a spectrum of the burn.