School set to track meteors

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from Northern Outlook

By David Hill, Local Democracy Reporter

North Canterbury amateur astronomers are set to help in the tracking of space rocks as they fire through the earth’s atmosphere above Canterbury.

Oxford Area School has joined a nationwide network of meteor trackers by installing a fireball-tracking camera above the entrance to its observatory.

Observatory volunteer Raul Elias-Drago said the camera was up and running and he could remote access it from his home.

There was just a technical issue to overcome, as it appeared the school’s firewall was preventing the uploading of images to the internet.

"It is exciting. You think - wow! It’s mounted, the hard work is done and now it is just a matter of resolving the IT," Mr Elias-Drago said.

The camera was pointing towards the celestial south pole, away from possible light pollution.

Observatories and schools throughout New Zealand were already part of the network with cameras installed.

The Canterbury Astronomical Society has mounted a camera at its observatory at West Melton, near Christchurch, which is pointing west, away from the Christchurch city lights.

The cameras captured the night sky on clear nights, being triggered by bright flashes.

Camera data was uploaded each day to the istrastream.com/rms-gmn/?country=NZ |Global Meteor Network|.

With enough cameras pointing at the night sky, it was possible to triangulate the trajectory, speed and mass of a space rock speeding through the Earth’s atmosphere.

This led to finding a meteorite in Dunedin last year.

It is believed that several meteorites landed in New Zealand each year, although only nine have been documented in the last 160 years.

The cameras were also capable of identifying meteor showers, with one camera capturing 400 meteors in one night last year.

Elias-Drago said the school hoped to use the images in science classes once the camera was fully operational.

Observatory volunteers were planning an event to mark the launch of the meteor camera next month.