page_title: Desert Fireball Network
section_title: Camera Hardware
hierarchical_section_title: Desert Fireball Network / Camera Hardware
caption_attribution_description: English: Solar panels and stand are topped by DFN observatory with heatshield and GNSS+GSM antenna clearly visisble.
context_page_description: The Desert Fireball Network is a network of cameras in Australia. It is designed to track meteoroids entering the atmosphere, and recover meteorites. It currently operates 50 autonomous cameras, spread across Western Australia and South Australia: Nullarbor plain, WA wheatbelt, and South Australian desert, covering an area of 2.5 million km². The locations of the stations were chosen to facilitate meteorite searching. Throughout 2018 and beyond, cameras will be deployed across the world to begin the first global fireball observatory, in association with partner research teams.
  The DFN observatories capture ≈30 second exposures of the sky from dusk until dawn every night, and the DFN team is automatically alerted if a fireball or meteor is detected. Based on the long-exposure images, trajectories and orbits are plotted in a semi-automated manner, and a fall line is generated to indicate the whereabouts and mass of any resultant meteorites on the ground.
context_section_description: The DFN observatories use consumer still photographic cameras (specifically DSLRs) with 8mm stereographic fish-eye lenses covering nearly the entire sky from each station. The cameras are controlled via an embedded Linux PC using gPhoto2 and images are archived to multiple hard disk drives for storage until the observatories are visited for maintenance (every 8–18 months depending on the storage capacity).
  The observatories take one long exposure image every 30 seconds for the entire night. After capture, automated event detection searches the images for fireballs, and events are corroborated on the central server using images from multiple stations.
  A GNSS synchronised time code is embedded in the long exposure images by the operation of a liquid crystal (LC) shutter to provide absolute timing data for fireball trajectories after triangulation with temporal precision better than one millisecond. Absolute timing is used for the calculation of meteoroid orbits and the relative timing also embedded by the timecode is required for trajectory analysis (specifically to calculate the mass from the deceleration of the meteoroid).
caption: Lambina DFN Station: a typical outback fireball observatory (with some unrelated equipment in the background).
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