UFOCapture Night Sky Observation Guide V2.0

1. Introduction

This document explains basic procedure of the night sky observation using UFOCaptureV2.0x , UFOAnalyzer V0.xx, UFOOrbit V0.xx.

UFOCaptureV2 provides functions below and enables us long term observation which is stable, efficient, and precise.

• Time shift motion capture
  • You can record directly to HDD the whole sequence of event which has begun in the past .
• 3 dimensional triggering thresholds
  • Brightness level change of each pixel (Detect Lev).
  • Area size (number of pixels which has changed its brightness more than Detect Lev) (Detect size)
  • Minimum and maximum duration of the event.
• Masking (Elimination of unwanted triggers)
  • Area mask (for ground object or unstable area in FOV)
  • Scintillation mask (for the scintillation of long term bright object such as stars)
  • Slow object mask (for the object which moves continuously and slow such as airplanes)
  • Dark object mask (for the object darker than back ground such as birds or insects)
• Automatic control of Detect Lev according to the back ground noise level.
• Automatic scheduling adjust to sunset and sunrise.
• Fixed star position detecting .
  • Automatically generated scintillation mask pattern enables you to measure FOV of each clip precisely.
• Many options (super impose, FTP, alarm, ....)

UFOAnalyzer provides functions below.

• Precise determination of FOV
  • Determination of direction and elevation of each pixel using starmap and distortion correction for each clip.
• Measure the movement of the event
  • Angle speed, path length, direction, linearity.
• Classification of th event.
  • Rule based automatic classification.
  • Grouping of meteors using radiants list.
• Reporting.
  • Trail map of meteors.
  • HTML report.
  • M.CSV for UFOOrbit

UFOOrbit provides functions below.

• Find simultaneous meteor observation from multi site results.
• Calculate orbital elements.
• Reporting
  • Radiants map
  • Trail map
  • Ground map
  • Orbit map

The figure below shows relations of 3 software and their outputs.

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References

SonotaCo Network Forum (Discussions about UFOCapture and nature observing)

SonotaCo.com (SonotaCo software publishing site)

SonotaCo home (SonotaCo personal observation site)

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Message

Telescope enable us to look far objects, microscope enable us to see small objects, with other many inventions we have enlarged our field of view and our knowledge. I believe UFOCapture enable us to see rare objects in time dimension. There may be many objects or phenomena which have not been even noticed. It will be great pleasure for me that this software helps somebody to find something.

I developed UFOCapture in spring of 2003. It was just a hobby driven from a little curiosity for the nature. But according to the increase of friends in network who gave me cheers and encouragements, UFOCapture has been grown up beyond my expectation. I sincerely appeal my regards to the people who gave me advises and motivations. There are alot of proposals for improvement, especially about UFOAnalyzer and UFOOrbit, since they are a kind of personal experimental tools yet. I wish I will be able to answer my friends by continuing of development.

Dec/2005 SonotaCo.

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