136 shooting stars and Geminid meteors, in 2 hours from Subaru Telescope, Hawaii
The Subaru Telescope in Hawaii has a 24/7 live stream of the night sky. Here are 136 meteors captured in 2 hours early in the morning. We used image-stacking to smooth the main video image which helps to remove a lot of the noise. Noise comes from video compression artefacts, camera sensor noise and atmospheric turbulence. For each frame of video we stack 4 consecutive raw frames on top of each other, and use the result in a single frame of finished video. You can see the numbers of the timestamp appear to blur due to the stacking process. The shooting stars are NOT stacked, instead we overlay a thin strip of the raw video aligned with the path each meteor has taken. If you look closely you can see more noise and the stars shimmering along that thin strip. Satellites and aircraft may appear in the stacked image as a row of small dots. Stacking also helps to bring out more detail from the night sky, and on dark nights you can see more of the feint light that is the structure of the Milky Way. In the thumbnail and introduction we show the paths of the meteors and this can help visualise where the meteors may be coming from. You can see how many of them seem to come from the same areas of sky and these may all be related to the same sources. A few shooting stars appear to be heading in random directions. This video was recorded using a script that downloads fragments of a youtube live stream and then combines them into a 10 minute sequence. There is a small gap of a few seconds in coverage between segments and any meteors appearing in the gap will be missed. We recorded 2 hours of video from 3:50 am, and scanned for shooting stars. We found 136 shooting stars in total. There may have been a few other shooting stars too feint for our detector to find. The video is scanned automatically to find shooting stars and a list of good video frames is created and used to make the finished video. the live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8rp1p_tWlc the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiN7OwV8g8dMm_E0xphBVig This video was processed entirely in Blender. But we used a few PERL and python scripts to make it all work.
The Subaru Telescope in Hawaii has a 24/7 live stream of the night sky. Here are 136 meteors captured in 2 hours early in the morning. We used image-stacking to smooth the main video image which helps to remove a lot of the noise. Noise comes from video compression artefacts, camera sensor noise and atmospheric turbulence. For each frame of video we stack 4 consecutive raw frames on top of each other, and use the result in a single frame of finished video. You can see the numbers of the timestamp appear to blur due to the stacking process. The shooting stars are NOT stacked, instead we overlay a thin strip of the raw video aligned with the path each meteor has taken. If you look closely you can see more noise and the stars shimmering along that thin strip. Satellites and aircraft may appear in the stacked image as a row of small dots. Stacking also helps to bring out more detail from the night sky, and on dark nights you can see more of the feint light that is the structure of the Milky Way. In the thumbnail and introduction we show the paths of the meteors and this can help visualise where the meteors may be coming from. You can see how many of them seem to come from the same areas of sky and these may all be related to the same sources. A few shooting stars appear to be heading in random directions. This video was recorded using a script that downloads fragments of a youtube live stream and then combines them into a 10 minute sequence. There is a small gap of a few seconds in coverage between segments and any meteors appearing in the gap will be missed. We recorded 2 hours of video from 3:50 am, and scanned for shooting stars. We found 136 shooting stars in total. There may have been a few other shooting stars too feint for our detector to find. The video is scanned automatically to find shooting stars and a list of good video frames is created and used to make the finished video. the live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8rp1p_tWlc the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiN7OwV8g8dMm_E0xphBVig This video was processed entirely in Blender. But we used a few PERL and python scripts to make it all work.