I am curious about the prospect of using OpenMV with a telescope to detect what are known as “telescopic meteors”. These are tiny meteors that you’d never notice with the naked eye, but we see rarely see whilst looking at something through the telescope. There are already plenty of good systems for detecting meteors over large areas of the sky, but the only people to try to detect telescopic meteors were at an observatory in Odessa about ten years ago.
The two crucial criteria to consider are, first, the low light sensitivity of the camera. I’m sure that this information is available somewhere, but I couldn’t find it here. Has anybody attempted to use OpenMV in low light conditions?
Second, I need to be able to detect a fast-moving point of light moving across the field of view. I have written software for handling this with regular meteor-detection cameras, but that was all in C++. Are any of the internal algorithms useful for detecting an object moving across the field of view in less that 10 frames?
Someone did it already: frank26080115/OpenMV-Astrophotography-Gear: using OpenMV to assist in astrophotography
However, it’s quite old and they made custom changes to the firmware you might want to reach out to them directly about things.
Second, I need to be able to detect a fast-moving point of light moving across the field of view. I have written software for handling this with regular meteor-detection cameras, but that was all in C++. Are any of the internal algorithms useful for detecting an object moving across the field of view in less that 10 frames?
Blob tracking? You then just do the object tracking and indication in software in Python given the detected blob lists.
Thanks much. I had read the fellow’s post here on OpenMV, but that didn’t provide the information I needed. However, the link to his full report, which I did not pursue when I first searched, does provide the critical bit of data: it takes a 1.5 second exposure for the camera to catch stars down to about 4th magnitude. That’s pretty good sensitivity, but it’s not enough to catch meteors; I can afford a maximum exposure time of roughly 50 ms, or about 1/30 of what is needed to get a 4th magnitude object. In other words, my limiting magnitude at 20 FPS is maybe magnitude 0 – about as bright as the 30 brightest stars in the sky.
Fortunately, I have one other tool: my telescope. Actually, I have a number of lenses I could use, in particular a 250mm fl, f/4 lens that could get add at least 3 magnitudes to the sensitivity of the camera.
So it looks as if this system might be workable.
Thanks for your help.
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