Standard Meteor Analysis

UFO Cameras

  • On a DAILY BASIS
    • I load the current month’s data into UFOAnalyser, by setting a suitable date range.
    • I delete any new clips containing aircraft, clouds etc using the “delete a clip” button.
    • Then I run through the analysis process to identify each meteor.
      • select the Profile/Analyse tab, then the Mask Editor tab on the right
      • select the 1st unanalysed clip
      • click “auto link” above the image to link stars
      • click adj pos all to align the star map.
      • Repeat these two steps till no more stars are linked and the system can’t improve the fit.
      • click the analyse button to check it works.
      • now select the Main tab and WITHOUT SELECTING ANY CLIP, click “analyse all”.
    • this will automatically start analysis from the clip you just aligned on
    • I then check the results of each analysis, and manually redo any i am not happy with.
  • On a MONTHLY BASIS
    • During the first week of each month I load the previous month’s data by setting a date range, then click the >Mcsv and >Rxml buttons to save the results in the folder containing the clips for that month.
    • I upload the CSV and XML files to the UKMON archive using the UKMOnArchiver programme

Pi Cameras

  • Edit 2020-06-30
    Its no longer necessary to perform daily analysis, provided you’re running the latest version of RMS and have made the recommended tweaks to your .config file. Most users now find that RMS filters out all but a handful of false positives and many nights you will get none at all. Furthermore as false positives are usually very local to your camera (eg tree branches, moonlight reflecting off a window, a nearby aircraft) they won’t match with any other station and so the orbit-matching backend will ignore them.
  • Additionally there is now a programme available from the ukmon-shared github repo which will automatically upload your data to UKMON each day. So you can completely automate the process.
  • However if you do still want to manually check here’s the process:
  • On a DAILY BASIS
    • Its critical to do this at least weekly – firstly otherwise it becomes very time consuming but critically, the PI purges older data even if not analysed, to save diskspace.
    • I run CMN Binviewer on my PC. Note: this requires the share on the Pi to be writable (see below). If you’re uncomfortable doing that, you can use the DailyReview script here which copies the files to your PC first.
    • I open the latest unprocessed ArchivedFiles folder directly from the Pi
      (eg \\mypi\rms_share\ArchivedFiles\CA0001_20200101_212323…)
    • I select “confirm/start” from the menu and follow instructions to confirm meteors and reject other objects. There may be some frames where the meteor was missed due to an aircraft – include these as confirmations so you can manually process them later.
    • When finished Confirming, I open the corresponding folder in ConfirmedFiles
    • I select each clip, click the Detected radiobutton, then save a jpg and gif version. If the meteor was missed then you may need to adjust the frames that are saved by the GIF version.
    • I also run a script on my Pi that runs several scripts to generate UFO-compatible data, the shower map, and a stack of the night’s captures:
      • python -m Utils.RMS2UFO $ftpfil $platepar
      • python -m Utils.ShowerAssociation $ftpfil –hideplot
      • python -m Utils.StackFFs $targ jpg -s -x

        $ftpfil is the FTPDetect file in the ConfirmedFiles folder, and $platepar is the platepar file. $targ is the folder containing the files.
        The script must be run from the ~/RMS/source folder so that it finds the Python modules.
        Also if you’re doing this over ssh rather than VNC, you will need to type
        export DISPLAY=:0.0
        first – some of the routines expect a GUI to be attached and will fail unless you redirect display to the Pi’s main screen.
    • If for any reason i missed a night I repeat this entire workflow for the NEXT unprocessed folder in ArchivedFiles.
    • Each night i also copy all the ConfirmedFiles folders to my PC, and then send the csv files to the UKMON archive using the UKMOnArchiver programme.

Making the Pi Share writable

  • login to the Pi and type “sudo su” to become root
  • edit /etc/samba/smb.conf with your preferred editor
  • find the [RMS_share] section
  • change Writeable to yes, create mask to 0644 and directory mask to 0777
  • Save and exit
  • Now reboot the pi. The share should be writable.
  • This is also useful if you want to create a platepar on your PC (which probably has more processing power than the Pi) as you can copy the created file back to the Pi then move it to ~/source/RMS.