Introduction

In an effort to study meteors as they ablate in the atmosphere, I have developed the ASGARD software which will detect video meteors in real-time and automatically analyse them to produce video and image summary files. For multi-station detections, atmospheric trajectories and heliocentric orbits are also determined by using some extra software written by Jiří Borovička and Zdeněk Ceplecha.

ASGARD is an acronym, meaning All Sky and Guided Automatic Realtime Detection. It was written using the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

The software is currently used by the University of Western Ontario, the University of Saskatchewan, and by the Meteoroid Environment Office at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama. There are also additional stations currently being deployed or in planning.

During September 2009, a meteorite fell in South Western Ontario, and has been named the Grimsby meteorite. The corresponding meteor video was detected by ASGARD.

Features
  • Automatic detection and analysis
  • Detection using live or pre-recorded video
  • Can stream video for later processing
  • Multiple simultaneous event detections
  • Astrometric measurements
  • Photometric measurements using companion reduction software
  • Non-meteor event (aircraft for example) rejection
  • Automatic event copying to central server
  • Daily summary e-mail and web log
The software is constantly improving, and this list will grow as new features are added. The links on the left of this page give an overview of running ASGARD in both all-sky and guided modes. There are also some example meteors that were detected with ASGARD.

Availability

The software is not currently available from me, as I need to focus on finishing my Ph.D. degree....