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The Global Meteor Network
August 7 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Free
The 7th of August meeting of Nelson Astronomical Society (NAS) will be
held at the Milton Room, Cawthron Institute, Milton Street and include
a talk by NAS co-chair Hamish Barker on the subject of the global
meteor network.
The Global meteor network (GMN) consists of a worldwide network of
1920 cameras monitoring the night sky across the globe, including over
100 in New Zealand. The cameras and their individual raspberry Pi
preprocessor computers are owned, operated and hosted by amateurs,
schools, and other institutions, including 5 stations owned and
operated by Nelson Astronomical Society members. Data from the GMN
stations is combined to detect and accurately measure speed and
direction of arrival of the over 300,000 incoming meteors every year.
Part of the mission of the network is to detect new meteor streams
which could then lead to the timely discovery of a large,
planet-threatening asteroid or comet whose orbit intersects that of
the earth.
Another motivation is to detect the fall of meteorites to the ground
with sufficient accuracy to recover fragments. Several such successful
recoveries have already been achieved, including the 2024 Tekapo
meteorite, the 10th meteorite ever recovered in New Zeland. The Tekapo
fall was so accurately tracked that the meteorite was discovered
within 30 minutes of the commencement of the ground search.