The Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO): System overview

• We designed an automated system to record meteors.
• Our system can track meteors in realtime, allowing detailed fragmentation studies.
• We can determine meteor positions to metre accuracy, for measuring deceleration.
• We present example meteors to demonstrate the capabilities of our system.

We describe the hardware and software for the Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory (CAMO), an automated two-station video meteor system designed to facilitate simultaneous radar-video meteor detections, to help constrain numerical ablation models with higher precision meteor data, and to measure the meteoroid mass influx at the Earth. A guided system with a wide-field (∼30°) camera detects meteors (<+5M) and positions an optical scanner such that a narrow-field (∼1°) camera tracks the meteors in real-time. This allows for higher precision deceleration measurements than traditionally available, and for detailed studies of meteoroid fragmentation. A second system with a wide-field (∼20°) camera detects fainter (<+7M) meteors (in non-real-time) primarily for meteoroid mass influx measurements. We describe the system architecture, automation control, and instruments of CAMO, and show example detections. We find narrow-field trajectory solutions have precisions in speed of a few tenths of a percent, and radiant precisions of ∼0.01°. Our initial survey shows 75% of all tracked, multi-station meteor events (<+5M) show evidence of fragmentation, either as discrete fragments (17% of total), or in the form of meteor wake. Our automatic wide-field camera solutions have average radiant errors of ∼3° and speed uncertainties of 3%.