News from the observatory of the January 12th 2010:

2010AL30

A WATEC 902H Ultimate equipped with a Computar 2.6mm f/1.0 auto-iris wide-field lens is placed inside an old “cooker”. To avoid winter frost and moisture outside the acrylic dome I placed a 12W warming resistance inside the “cooker”. This setup rises the temperature by about 5°C to 10 °C above outside temperature. The humidity inside the dome is kept low (typically 10% relative) by grains of desiccant.

The software UFOCapture is used to trigger astronomical events and to store AVI files of the captured meteors.

METEORS

In a typical clear night the all-sky camera detects +2mag stars. Meteors brighter than 0mag are captured.

In 3 months, from January to March 2009, the camera captured 212 meteors.

SPRITES

The all-sky camera detects also atmospheric phenomena, like sprites.

These two images, extracted from videos, show the rapid phenomena of sprites.

The sprite of the June 25th 2009.

The sprite of the July 17th 2009.

The seven sprites of July 27th 2009.

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