Star Safari has a meteor camera as part of the Fireballs Aotearoa network. This network has over 150 cameras spread throughout New Zealand giving complete covergae of the whole country. The meteors picked up commonly called ‘shooting stars’.

Our camera is NZ002D and located at Star Safari Observatory. It is positioned to look to the North and can see meteors as far away as Auckland, New Plymouth, and Tauranga.

Once the camera has finished capturing the data from the night it is uploaded to the Global Meteor Network and each of the images captured by the camera are automatically examined for meteors. If other cameras on the same network have picked up the same meteors then tracks can be plotted and a wealth of other information calculated.

The map above shows the meteor tracks that our meteor camera has helped plot over the previous seven days. It is coloured coded by days. It is a 3D map so you move it around to give some idea of the distribution.