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%.