It’s that time of year again, time for jack-o-lanterns, scarecrows and things that go bump in the night. At NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, our all-sky meteor cameras capture some unusual images as nocturnal visitors creep, crawl, slither and swoop in for their own “close-up.”
The cameras are part of the NASA All-Sky Fireball Network set up by NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, located at Marshall. The goal of the network is to monitor meteors brighter than the planet Venus, also called fireballs. There are 17 cameras in the network in nine states, including several cameras located at Marshall. The data from the cameras is used to monitor fireballs, calculate details about them, and help the Meteoroid Environment Office use that information to inform engineers when they are designing spacecraft.
“These cameras are specialized black and white video cameras with lenses that allow for a view of the whole night sky,” said Bill Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “We get data from the cameras that allows us to figure out where a specific fireball came from, how fast it is traveling, and if it could possibly survive to make it to the ground as a meteorite.”
Cooke says he and his colleagues discovered the cameras were collecting images that definitely were not fireballs several years ago. “Our cameras here at Marshall are located near a wooded area so it wasn’t surprising that we caught a few unusual visitors,” said Cooke.
Those unusual visitors have included racoons, bats, spiders and owls. While Cooke and his team are focused on understanding meteoroids and how they could impact spacecraft traveling in and beyond Earth’s orbit, he passed on the images to the social media team at Marshall thinking they would be something fun to post on Halloween.
Data from the cameras featuring fireballs can be found on the NASA All-Sky Fireball Network website, and anyone can go and download the images, movies, diagrams and text files. For a complete album of our favorite eerie images from the cameras, visit Marshall’s Flickr gallery:
