IMO Video Meteor Database Updated

The database of the IMO Video Meteor Network has been updated recently and now contains all observations until December 31, 2007. It is made of 328112 meteor records, collected in 2816 nights and 72582 hours of effective observing time. The PosDat data can be downloaded from the IMO website and from the IMO Video Network Homepage.

In March 1999, a video camera network was established by the German Arbeitskreis Meteore (AKM). By the end of 1999, it consisted of four cameras, and it has been growing ever since. In the next few years, not only observers from Germany joined the initiative, but also from other countries. Because of its international character, the network has been renamed to IMO Video Meteor
Network in 2004.

By December 2007, the network had grown to 17 sites in Germany, Slovenia, Italy, Finland, UK, Spain and the USA that provide regular video observations each month. Another 7 stations in Italy, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic
supply additional data in selected nights. All cameras work fully automated with the MetRec software. The single station data are collected at a central site, quality checked, and finally entered into the IMO Video Meteor Database.

This database contains for each meteor

• the appearance date and time (*)
• equatorial coordinates of the start and end point of the mean meteor trail (*)
• the apparent meteor velocity and an brightness estimate (*)
• the shower membership according to IMO’s working list (*)
• position and brightness data from each individual video frame
• a sum image and a short animation of the meteor

All data marked with an asterisk (*) are available online in IMO’s PosDat format.