A camera of the fireball network near Daun in the Eifel . The camera is mounted on the tripod and aimed at the reflective hemisphere below, in order - similar to a fisheye - to survey the largest possible room.
The European fireball network is used to observe and record bright meteors , so-called fireballs (also called bolides).
After the Přibram meteorite was discovered in 1959 as the world's first meteorite using camera recordings, the Ondřejov observatory began to set up a network of cameras in 1963 to observe the night sky. In 1968 it was expanded to Germany. Locations in other Central European countries followed later. The fireball network is operated by the Ondřejov observatory and the DLR Institute of Planetary Research .
functionality
The meteor cameras are set up at a distance of around 100 kilometers and cover an area of around one million square kilometers. Almost every camera captures the entire part of the sky that is visible to it, as it is photographed through a curved mirror. On the other hand, cameras on the Czech side are equipped with so-called fisheye lenses and point towards the zenith.
Every night each camera takes a long exposure of the sky. In front of the cameras there is an additional shutter rotating at 12.5 Hz, which makes it possible to capture bright, fast-moving objects such as meteors as an interrupted tracer of light on film. On the basis of this recorded movement, conclusions can be drawn about the duration of the light and the speed of the fireball.
If a meteor is recorded by at least two stations at the same time, its exact trajectory in the earth's atmosphere can be determined three-dimensionally by triangulation . This is especially important to find meteorite fragments that have not burned out , such as B. 2002 was the case with the meteorite Neuschwanstein .
The European fireball network registers an average of 50 meteors with an apparent brightness ( magnitude ) brighter than m = -6.
