News blog:
2025 March 24 - Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers was named a finalist for the 2025 PROSE Award in Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, and Cosmology by the Association of American Publishers. The PROSE Awards are the Oscars in science book publishing. [More]
2024 Aug 27 - Corrected version now avaliable.
2023 Oct 24 - The book Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers has been published. A 'birders guide' to meteor showers, the 824 page book describes 513 meteor showers in maps, tables and text. The book adds 108 new meteor showers to the list of known showers and presents much new data on meteoroid stream dispersions and ages and meteoroid physical properties.
[Order here]
2026, March 2 - Lookup Tables and pertinent data for all 513 showers in the Atlas book have been submitted to the Meteor Data Center for archiving. [More]
2026, Feb. 24 - The SETI Institute received a new grant from NASA that will help to continue the operation of CAMS in the coming three years.
2026, Feb. 24 - D. Vida, D. Segon, P. Roggemans, J. Wood, W. J. Cooke and A. Vriezelaar report that the compact delta Normid meteor shower, discovered from CAMS observations, had an outburst this year. [More]
2026, Jan 2 - Nature's own fireworks, the Volantid meteor shower, showed up again this New Year's Eve. This establishes a 5-year periodicity, which means that the meteoroids are trapped in the 7:3 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter. [More]
2026, Jan 1 -
Very happy to report that the raw tally of measured orbits in 2025 comes out to about 520,000, which is only slightly lower than the 570,000 of 2024. Existing networks typically see a gradual decline due to such things as aging cabling, but CAMS BeNeLux has grown and there is now a new network in Denmark, the Nordic Meteor Network headed by James Scott. The ranking of stations has not changed much, mostly reflecting the number and manner of cameras deployed. Here are the individual preliminary tallies of raw triangulations, with last year's 2024 results between brackets:
New Zealand (J. Scott, J. Baggaley, et al.): 159,894 (175,737)
BeNeLux (C. Johannink, M. Breukers, et al.): 102,836 (72,986)
Arizona (N. Moskovitz, B. Rachford, et al.): 62,653 (87,123)
Australia (H. Devillepoix, D. Rollinson, ea): 48,007 (65,789)
Namibia (T. Hanke, E. Fahl, R. van Wyk): 43,383 (54,402)
UAE (M. Odeh, et al.): 27,012 (29,113)
Florida (A. Howell, et al.): 25,928 (21,463)
Chile (S. Heathcote, E.Jehin, T. Abbott): 15,704 (28,855)
California (P. Jenniskens, T. Beck et al.): 12,170 (15,181)
Denmark (J. Scott): 11,229 (since 5/14)
South Africa (T. Cooper, P. Mey): 8,384 (8,538)
Arkansas (L. Juneau, S. Austin): 4,555 (7,395)
Texas (W. Cooney, et al.): 2,092 (5,436)
Turkey (O. Unsalan, et al.): 303 (296)
Brazil (M. De Cicco, et al.): 3 (78)
2025, Dec 31 - The Volantids meteor
shower (IAU shower no. 758) was detected in the southern hemisphere during New
Year's Eve 2025. A total of 100 Volantid meteors were triangulated
between solar longitudes 274 and 284 degrees, centered on a median solar
longitude 279.82 +/- 0.11 degrees (equinox J2000.0). This episodic Jupiter-
family-comet shower with geocentric radiant R.A. = 123 deg, Decl. = -72 deg
and geocentric velocity 30 km/s around solar longitude 279 degress was
previously detected around 2015 Dec. 31 and around 2020 Dec. 31. This year's
return establishes a five-year periodicity, which suggests that these
meteoroids are trapped in the 7:3 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter (period
5.08 years). The parent Jupiter family comet is not known.
[More]
2025, Oct 21 - CAMS IS 15 YEARS! During the Orionid shower on October 21, 2010, CAMS cameras at Fremont Peak Observatory and in Mountain View in California triangulated the first meteors in what became a decade and a half long global effort to map our meteor showers. On October 2 that year, the Fremont Peak Observatory station saw first light. Preliminary observations started on October 21, 2010, from Mountain View. Congratulations to all who built and operate the CAMS network, and thank you for your enthousiasm, friendship and devotion to map the skies! [More here]
2025, Oct 08 - A predicted outburst of Draconids was detected by the United Arab Emeriates Astronomical Camera Network. [More]
2025, Sept 27 - CAMS stations in the southern hemisphere detected an outburst of an unknown shower caused by debris from a Jupiter-family comet. [More]
2025, Sep 3 - The Global Meteor Network reports a detection of an outburst in Aries from a Halley-type comet. [More]
2025, Sep 3 - CAMS BeNeLux detected the chi-Cygnids meteor shower again, an episodic shower that now is shown to have a 5-year periodicity. This suggests that the meteoroids are trapped in the 7:3 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter (period of 5.08 year).[More]
2025, July 7 - This week, CAMS results were presented at the Meteoroids 2025 conference in Perth, Australia. A poster was dedicated to how meteor observations informed about the origin of the Oort Cloud.
2025, June 26 - CAMS stations in South Africa, Arizona, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates detected an outburst of 3-Sagittariids. [More]
2025, June 6 - The Global Meteor Network reported the detection of two outbursts that were possibly from comet 73P. [More]
2025, June 1 - A new camera network has been founded in Denmark, soon to be expanded to other nordic countries. The network is called the Nordic Meteor Network and is now participating in CAMS. The coordinator is James Scott, who also founded a large network of cameras in New Zealand.
2025, May 15 - Dave Rollinson has created a script to make it easier to add RMS cameras to the CAMS network.
2025, April 26 - CAMS BeNeLux participant Koen Miskotte from Harderwijk, the Netherlands, received a commendation from the Dutch king today: he became a knight in the order of Oranje Nassau" for his 45 years of visual meteor observations, his participation in CAMS, and his community work in advancing meteor observations in the Netherlands.
2025, April 16 - Stu Pilorz and Peter Jenniskens published a paper in Icarus answering the question how and why long-period comet meteoroid streams disperse.
[More]
2025, April 10 - Pete Gural has completed the software development that enables the deployment of the ZWO 687 ASI camera in the CAMS network. This is a 4K camera of high pixel format that has only slightly lower sensitivity than the Watec cameras. Equipped with a 4-mm or 5-mm f1.0 lens, this camera can replace a full 16-camera Watec station with only two cameras and an i9 mini-PC for a fraction of the cost. The first camera has been tested by Carl Johannink in Gronau and more cameras are soon to be deployed in the CAMS BeNeLux network.
2025, March 24 - AAP, the Association of American Publishers announced its annual PROSE awards last week. The book "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" is a 2025 PROSE Award Finalist in Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, and Cosmology. In this category, these books were awarded:
= The Restless Cell: Continuum Theories of Living Matter by Christina Hueschen and Rob Phillips, Princeton University Press
= Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers by Peter Jenniskens, Elsevier Inc.
= Introduction to Quantum Cryptography by Thomas Vidick and Stephanie Wehner, Cambridge University Press
The publisher Elsevier has
ten books awarded this year, nine last year.
The Atlas is the only book in astronomy or cosmology among them.
[Finalists]
2025, March 17 - Peter Jenniskens and Hadrien Devillepoix published a review article "Review of asteroid, meteor, and meteorite-type links" in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The article describes various potential source regions for our meteorites. [More]
2025, January 11 - SonotaCo observations are now posted in near-real time at NASA's Meteor Shower Portal SonotaCo website. Check out the dates of January 1-12, 2025. To do so, Toru Kanomori has created an automatic update program providing the latest set of orbit solutions for display.
2025, January 03 - The year 2024 has been the most productive yet for the global CAMS networks. The raw tally of measured orbits comes out to about 570,000, higher than the 490,000 of 2023. We reported on the 2022 outburst of August delta-Capricornids and on the annual shower associated with the 2024 outburst iota-Herculids, and detected new outbursts this year from the iota-Centaurids, the beta-Tucanids, the 51-Sagittids, the psi Fornacids, the nu-Capricornids, the September psi-Cassiopeiids, and the December phi-Cassiopeiids.
On the heels of the book "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" in October of 2023, we prepared a set of corrections now implemented in the latest version of the book. In 2024 we also published a paper on
the lifetime of cm-sized meteoroids in the interplanetary medium.
Also on pebbles in comets, concluding that the Oort cloud must have formed later than the Scattered Disk of the Kuiper Belt:
[Read More].
And on how meteor showers can guide the future search for potentially hazardous long-period comets:
[Space.Com].
Here are the individual preliminary tallies, with last year's 2023 results between brackets:
New Zealand (J. Scott, J. Baggaley, et al.): 175,737 (23,426)!!
LO-CAMS (N. Moskovitz, B. Rachford, et al.): 87,123 (107,857)
BeNeLux (C. Johannink, M. Breukers, et al.): 72,986 (56,741)
Australia (H. Devillepoix, D. Rollinson et al.): 65,789 (59,948)
Namibia (T. Hanke, E. Fahl, R. van Wyk): 54,402 (73,960)
UAE (M. Odeh, et al.): 29,113 (33,585)
Chile (S. Heathcote, E.Jehin, T. Abbott): 28,855 (37,606)
CA (P. Jenniskens, T. Beck, et al.): 23,645 (40,118)
FL (A. Howell et al.): 21,463 (25,255)
South Africa (T. Cooper, P. Mey): 8,538 (7,422)
AR (L. Juneau, S. Austin): 7,395 (12,713)
Texas (W. Cooney, et al.): 5,436 (11,709)
Turkey (O. Unsalan, et al.): 296 (758)
Brazil (M. De Cicco, et al.): 78 (29)
This year, RMS cameras for the first time provided more orbits than the Watec cameras, mainly due to the large number of such cameras deployed now. Most significant was the full integration of a network of RMS cameras into CAMS New Zealand at the end of 2023. Part of the Global Meteor Network, the network was set up, and is maintained, by James Scott at the University of Otago. The network has grown to over 100 wide field cameras regularly reporting.
The Watec camera networks in Namibia, South Africa, Chile, and Australia still uniquely cover these parts of the world, as do the networks in the UAE and Florida, Arkansas and Texas.
2024, November 15 - Peter Jenniskens visits Toru Kanamori in Tokyo, Japan. Kanamori-san wrote the UFO Capture software and is the coordinator of the SonotaCo video camera network that has been in operation in Japan since 2007. He also has his own camera station on the roof of his house with spectacular views of Tokyo.
Sam Hemmelbarn at Clark Telescope. Photo: Daily Sun [In the news]
2024, November 13 - Sam Hemmelgarn, Nick Moskovitz, Stu Pilorz and Peter Jenniskens published a paper on how to use the meteor observations of long-period comet showers to find the location of their parent bodies:
[Read more]
2024, November 10 - A paper called "Properties of outer solar system pebbles during planetesimal formation from meteor observations" was published in Icarus.
The paper concludes that long-period comets and Jupiter-family comets are different and that Jupiter-family comets represent all planetesimals scattered by an outward moving Uranus and Neptune during formation of the solar system, while long-period comets are only those planetesimals that were scattered at the very end of the formation period, when the Sun had moved out of its birth cloud and could form a stable Oort cloud. The paper is based on CAMS and CAMS Spectrograph data. [Read More]
2024, September 30 - An outburst of September psi-Cassiopeiids was detected by LO-CAMS cameras. A paper was published in eMeteorNews by Peter Jenniskens and Nick Moskovitz.
2024, August 26-30 - Peter Jenniskens talks about results from CAMS at the Meteoroids meeting in Huntsville, Alabama.
2024, August 27 - A corrected version of "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" is now available. The uncorrected version has shower "331" listed as being on page 331 in the index. The shower is actually on page 121.
2024, August 18 - During the Perseid season, CAMS cameras detected a meteor outburst with a radiant in Capricorn, at some distance from the alpha-Capricornids.
2024, July 30 - Peter Jenniskens gives a talk "Review of Asteroid, Meteor, and Meteorite type links" for the Meteoritical Society meeting in Brussels, Belgium. CAMS observations contributed to four meteorite falls: Novato, Creston, Dishchii'bikoh, and Tekapo.
2024, July 16 - The April 27-28 shower of iota-Herculids has a weak associated annual shower in CAMS data. A paper was published in eMeteorNews vol 9, p. 234-235.
2024, July 15 - A paper "51-Sagittids meteor shower confirmed by CAMS" talks aobut a recent meteor outburst detected on May 14-15, 2024, by the Global Meteor Network. The shower was also detected by CAMS in prior years and appaers to be a weak annual shower from a yet-to-be-discovered long-period comet.
2024, June 01 - Today, the paper called "Lifetime of cm-sized zodiacal dust from the physical and dynamical evolution of meteoroid streams" was published in the journal Icarus.
The paper concludes that the cm-sized meteoroids ejected by comets are pulverized into smoke-sized particles that make up the zodiacal clouds by a process called thermal stresses. The lifetime of cm-sized meteoroids in the inner solar system depends on the temperature of the grains, not on the density of dust. [Read More]
2024, May 01 - Significant activity of the beta-Tucanids (BTU, shower 108) was detected by CAMS. Previous outbursts were recorded in 2020 and 2021. Source is the now dormant comet 2006 CS. [Read More]
2024, March 01 - An outburst of iota-Centaurids (IAU number 919) was detected by both the northern and southern hemisphere CAMS networks. The parent body is unknown. The orbital elements are those of a Halley-type or long-period comet, but the semi-major axis is only 4.8 AU. That makes it possible that meteoroids are trapped in mean-motion resonance. [Read More]
2024, March 13 - A meteorite fall close to Mount John Observatory was captured in the Mount John Observatory CAMS cameras. The meteor trail was very short, moving towards the observatory. The meteor was also captured by cameras of the Global Meteor Network in New Zealand, led by James Scott. One fragment was recovered soon after the fall. A second fragment is suspected to exist from CAMS data, but has not been found yet.
2024 March 12 - A manuscript "Lifetime of cm-sized zodiacal dust from the dynamical and physical evolution of meteoroid streams" was accepted for publication in the journal Icarus. [Read More]
2024 Feb 29 - Peter Jenniskens talked on the recovery of asteroid 2024 BX1 and on the "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" at the Global Meteor Network 2024 meeting. [Youtube]
2024 Feb 14 - An unexpected outburst of iota-Centaurids (ICN, number 9191) was observed in late January by southern hemisphere CAMS networks. [Read more]
2024, January 05 - Tim Beck and Peter Jenniskens published an article in JIMO called "August delta-Capricornids 2022 observations by CAMS".
2024 Jan 01 - Happy to report that the global CAMS networks have added another half a million orbits to our database this year! The raw tally of measured orbits for 2023 comes out to about 490,000, on par with the 510,000 of 2022 and the 470,000 from 2021. Data gathered up to July 2, 2023, contributed to the new book "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" that came out in late October. Here are the individual preliminary tallies, with 2022 results between brackets:
LO-CAMS (N. Moskovitz, B. Rachford, et al.): 107,857 (106,596)
Namibia (T. Hanke, E. Fahl, R. van Wyk): 73,960 (81,197)
Australia (H. Devillepoix, D. Rollinson, ea.):59,948 (38,114)
BeNeLux (C. Johannink, M. Breukers, et al.): 56,741 (61,619)
CA (P. Jenniskens, T. Beck, et al.): 40,118 (52,130)
Chile (S. Heathcote, E.Jehin, T. Abbott): 37,606 (49,051)
UAE (M. Odeh, et al.): 33,585 (32,597)
FL (A. Howell, et al.): 25,255 (26,454)
New Zealand (J. Baggaley, J. Scott, et al.): 23,426 (16,856)
AR (L. Juneau, S. Austin): 12,713 (18,972)
Texas (W. Cooney, et al.): 11,709 (19,063)
South Africa (T. Cooper, P. Mey): 7,422 (7,867)
Turkey (O. Unsalan, et al.): 758 (1,605)
Brazil (M. De Cicco, et al.): 29 (105)
Arizona's LO-CAMS is again the most prolific network on the northern hemisphere, while CAMS Namibia keeps that crown on the southern hemisphere. Congratulations to network coordinators Nick Moskovitz and Toni Hanke. Not much changed in the network rankings from the previous year, except for a significant increase in the yield from CAMS Australia due to the added deployment of RMS cameras by David Rollinson, Jeff Wood, and collaborators. Astronomer Hadrien Devillepoix at Curtin University took over responsibilities for coordinating CAMS Australia from Martin Towner.
2023 Dec 29 - Mohammad Odeh reports that he was able to remove video interference from the UACN station 3 cameras using inexpensive video ground-loop isolator baluns and by replacing the Sensoray blue dongle cable.
He also used bulb grease to protect the bnc connectors from corrosion.
2023 Dec 20 - A paper "The lifetime of cm-sized zodiacal dust from the dynamical and physical evolution of meteoroid streams" was submitted to the journal Icarus.
2023 Dec 13 - With clear weather over the north island of New Zealand, James and his team captured a predicted outburst of lambda-Sculptorids on December 13, the first meteors ever detected from comet 46P/Wirtanen, the initial target of ESA's Rosetta mission before launch delays changed the target to 67P. The south island was clouded out, but the outburst was confirmed by CAMS Australia.
[Read more]
2023 Dec 11 - At the AGU 2023 meeting in San Francisco, Peter Jenniskens and Stu Pilorz describe results on the evolution of meteoroid streams in the inner solar system based on the data published in the book.
2023 Dec 7 - Luke Juneau, operator of CAMS Arkansas, visited the CAMS California station in Sunnyvale, operated by Jim Albers and Diana Gilbert.
2023 Oct 20 - Mohammad Odeh reports that the paper "New showers identified among meteors observed in the UAE." has been published in the journal Experimental Astronomy.
2023 Oct 19 - James Scott (U. of Otago) has added 96 RMS cameras (so far) to CAMS New Zealand. These cameras also contribute to the Global Meteor Network (D. Vida), but their data is combined with CAMS astrometric observations and reduced slightly differently.
The image above compares the trajectories calculated by GMN and CAMS for the night of October 19/20, 2023.
2023 Aug 31 - Peter Jenniskens talks about the new book at the International Meteor Conference in Redu, Belgium.
2023 Aug 2 - Siddha Ganju, Amartya Hatua and colleagues posted a paper "AI-Enhanced data processing and discovery crowd sourcing for meteor shower mapping" on ArXiv.
[Read More]
2023 June 18 - The Asteroid, Comets, Meteors 2023 Conference was organized by Nick Moskovitz and colleagues in Flagstaff, AZ, this year. Presentations based on ongoing work with CAMS included talks by Stu Pilorz of the SETI Institute, and Sam Hemmelgarn of Lowell Observatory.
2023 May 22 - The book 'Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers' is now available for pre-order. It is expected to come out in October of 2023.
2023 March 06 - P. Jenniskens reports that the February Hydrid meteor shower (IAU shower 1032) had unusually strong activity this year. [CBET report]
2023 Jan 01 - The global CAMS networks continued to operate well during 2022 and increased their combined annual yield to about 510,000 orbits/year, up from last year's 470,000. The yield increases for CAMS California and the United Arab Emirates Astronomical Camera Network are the result of an upgrade to new Watec Wat902 H2 Ultimate cameras in 2021. This doubled the yield for the UACN.
The new CAMS India network is slowly being assembled and hopefully will achieve first light in the new year. Much of the remaining growth this year came as a result of the addition of RMS cameras to the LO-CAMS, BeNeLux and Australia networks. These cameras also reported to the Global Meteor Network (Denis Vida). David Rollinson has worked out a way to submit past RMS camera data, as a result of which the 2022 tally for CAMS Australia is expected to increase when that effort is completed. Arizona's LO-CAMS is now the most prolific network on the northern hemisphere, while CAMS Namibia keeps that crown on the southern hemisphere.
2022 November 23 - Peter Jenniskens reports that the manuscript 'Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers' has been submitted to the publisher. It will take a few more months to come out in press.
2022 November 10 - Siddha Ganju, Amartya Hatua, Chicheng Ren, Sahyadri Krishna and Chad Roffey officially release a new website meteorshowers.seti.org that is a more user friendly visualization of CAMS results, during a SETI Live event.
2022 October 31 - Peter Jenniskens has completed the data reduction of the March 2013 to August 2014 data collected by the CAMS Spectrgraph.
2022 October 24 - Carl Johannink reports that CAMS BeNeLux now is true to its name: a RMS camera was installed in the Luxembourg village of Roodt sur Syre by Philippe Schaack. The CAMS BeNeLux network now has cameras in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, as well as in Germany, the UK and northern France.
2022 September 23 - A manuscript was submitted to Icarus about the CAMS-directed search for meteors from asteroid Bennu.
2022 August 17 - An unexpected outburst of August delta Capricornids from comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajudsakova was detected by CAMS. A CBET telegram was issued.
2022 August 12 - ERAU undergraduate student Clarissa Pavo gave a final presentation for the SETI Institute's REU program, describing her efforts to automate the CAMS Spectrograph data reduction by building a deep learning tool to recognize meteor spectra among aircraft spectra in the data.
2022 August 10 - The SETI Institute received a new NASA grant that will support the CAMS project in coming years.
2022 June 14 - Peter Jenniskens gave an online video presentation today about Dynamical and Physical Properties of 400 CAMS-Detected Meteor Showers at the online Meteoroids 2022 conference. The talk describes progress on a new book project called "Atlas of Earth's Meteor Showers" [Video here]
2022 May 31 - The tau Herculids peaked tonight and were well recorded by CAMS networks in the United States and Chile. A CBET telegram was issued. Much as predicted, Earth passed through recent 1995 dust ejecta of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3.
2022 May 30 - Jim Albers reports that leading up to the anticipated tau-Herculid outburst, the CAMS California station in Sunnyvale has now also upgraded its cameras. This completes the refurbishing of CAMS California.
2022 May 1 - The SETI Institute has moved to a new address.
2022 April 26 - The United Arab Emirates Astronomical Camera Network (UACN) has upgraded its cameras and now has three complete stations. The lightcurves look clean and calibrations are holding well. A good number of orbits were measured for a quiet spring night.
2022 January 1 - The international CAMS network continued to operate well despite the ongoing COVID pandemic. The yield of triangulated meteors increased to about 470,000 this year, up from 418,000 last year. CAMS Texas started in September 2020 and this year quickly grew into a significant network. CAMS Turkey started with 16 cameras at three stations on August 3 this year, and has measured 1323 orbits. A new network is being assembled in India, following a public fundraising effort. Both the aging UACN and the CAMS California networks have received support to replace their cameras. CAMS California added a new station in Windsor (T. Beck). CAMS Namibia again was the most prolific network this year, having the benefit of both excellent weather and carefully managed stations by Toni Hanke, Elize Fahl and Rynault van Wyk. A close second now is Nick Moskovitz' LO-CAMS network, which is rapidly expanding by adding RMS cameras across Arizona and almost doubled its yield in 2021. CAMS BeNeLux has also grown by adding more RMS cameras.
Arid radiants seen by CAMS on Sept. 29/30 2021
2021 Sept. 29 - CAMS networks in New Zealand and Chile detected a predicted outburst of meteors from comet 15P/Finlay on Spetember 27-30, the first time meteors were seen from this comet and the new shower is called the "Arids" (number 1130). The outburst was caused by Earth crossing the 1995 dust ejecta.
There is perhaps more to come. On October 6/7, Earth will cross the 2014 dust trail. The comet had two activity outbursts in 2014 and Ye et al. (2015) expect a denser trail and perhaps higher rates as a result. [More here]
2021 September 21 - Ozan Unsalan reports that the CAMS Turkey network cameras received new lenses and now show rich star fields.
2021 September 15 - Siddha Ganju reports that the three camera enclosures for CAMS India have been shipped.
2021 September 10 - Peter Jenniskens gave a talk on CAMS for the Houston Astronomical Society.
2021 August 14 - CAMS Texas and CAMS California detected an outburst of Perseids bewteen 6 and 11h UTC today. Peak rates increased to ZHR = 130 per hour above normal 40 per hour Perseid rates. The peak was at 8.2 h UTC August 14. Most meteors were faint. This encounter with the dust trails or Filament of 109P/Swift-Tuttle was not anticipated.
2021 August 13 - Carl Johannink reports that over 1000 meteors were captured by CAMS BeNeLux. The graph above shows their trajectories. Most are Perseids. Graph is courtesy of Tammo Jan Dijkema.
2021 August 9 - Peter Jenniskens reports that northern heisphere networks are detecting an outburst of kappa Cygnids. The shower is known to return every 7 years since it was first seen in 1879. The years 2020 and 2021 fit in that sequence. Carl Joannink of Cams BeNeLux reports that 2021 rates seem to be better than 2020. The shower is expected to peak around the time of Perseid maximum. The shower is known for occasional fireballs with multiple flares.
[PDF]
2021 August 8 - Walt Cooney reports that another station with 8 cameras was added to CAMS Texas. After completing a 4-camera station in Magnolia (Fred Cyrway), an 8-camera station was added by Joel Brewer in Sealy. Luke Juneau and Dave Samuels assisted with the hardware and software installation.
First night of observations of the expanded CAMS Texas network resulted in a total of 233 meteors, among wich were meteors from an outburst of kappa Cygnids (KCY in the plot above).
CAMS Turkey station in Yozgat
2021, August 3 - Ozan Unsalan reports that, with the help of Dave Samuels, CAMS Turkey achieved first light tonight. The network consists of 6, 5 and 5 cameras, respectively, at three locations in central Turkey. Two Perseids and one sporadic meteor were captured from Kayzeri and Yozgat. Setup continues at the third site in Akdagmaden.
2021, July 27 - Walt Cooney reports that CAMS Texas has expanded with a 4-camera station operated by Fred Cyrway. On the first night of operations, a nice fireball with three flares was captured just above Jupiter. The Moon is to the left on the edge of the frame.
2021, July 22 - Siddha Ganju reports that CAMS now has its own Wikipedia website.
2021, June 19 - CAMS observations in 2021 showed a new shower in the June Aquilid complex, now called the June theta2 Sagittariids. The shower was also seen in 2020, but not in prior years. [Read More]
2021, May 25 - The SETI Institute has created for us a crowd funding campaign to help establish a CAMS India network to patch a gap in global CAMS coverage. For this campaign, special mugs and T-shirts were designed.
[Support a CAMS India observatory]
Update: The campaign has ended. 88 people supported the project and thanks to additional donations our funding goal was reached. Thank you!
2021, May 6 - Pete Gural has modified the Coincidence program (v 2.39) to reject trajectories that are nearly completely below 25 degrees elevation, so that now the LO-CAMS and BeNeLux data from RMS cameras using the correct field of view (3.6 mm or longer focal length lenses) can be included in the CAMS data processing pipeline.
2021, Apr. 20 - A paper appeared online today in the journal ICARUS describing the long-period comet showers in CAMS data that have known shower parent bodies. It was found that most long-period comet showers are active for many days, showing precession of the comet orbit over time. Meteor showers were found for nearly all known comets approaching Earth orbit to 0.01 AU that have orbital periods in the 250 to 4,000 year range.
2021, Apr. 8 - Nick Moskovitz reports that LO-CAMS has dramatically expanded, adding Global Meteor Network (RMS) cameras to their network. The coming weeks will see RMS data included in the network results from one of the cameras at Mars Hill, after which more cameras from other stations will be added. There are 6 RMS cameras per station.
2021, Apr. 1 - After many years of manually processing the CAMS BeNeLux data, Carl Johannink and Martin Breukers now report that per April 1 the data reduction will be automated. The station operators in the CAMS BeNeLux network will still check the results, so there are few false detections going into the Coincidence triangulation process. Main issue to be solved now is how to include the Global Meteor Network cameras in the CAMS BeNeLux network, which often capture meteors low in the sky. When the station is far from the meteor track, this introduces inaccurate trajectories in the triangulation calculation.
2021, March 27 - Station Bindoon of CAMS Australia has an unusual problem as of late: insects. The video feed shows many dots of light darting around the cameras, creating numerous false detections. The firefly population will remain active for the coming weeks.
2021, March 22 - Peter Jenniskens reports in a CBET telegram that southern hemisphere CAMS networks detected an unusual shower on March 22, 2021. The shower is called the zeta Pavonids (IAU number 853). The shower activity profile had a full width at half maximum duration of only 0.46 degrees centered on 1.41 degree solar longitude. The shower was detected between 2021 March 21 19h and March 22 11h UTC. [More here].
2021, March 13 - Peter Jenniskens reports in a CBET telegram that southern hemisphere CAMS networks detected strong activity from the beta TUcanids (IAU number 108). Initially mistaken for the nearby delta Mensids (IAU 130), this shower was also strong in radar observations last year in 2020. A total of 29 beta Tucanids were triangulated by CAMS networks this year, compared to 5 meteors last year. [More here].
2021, March 1 - Eric Egland reports that he has added video ground-loop isolator baluns to the Fremont Peak Observatory station cameras. The baluns were mounted between the camera and the 75ft BNC cables and immediately removed much if not all of the video interference that had gradually built up over the years.
2021, February 12 - Peter Jenniskens reports in a CBET telegram that southern hemisphere networks in Australia (M. Towner, coordinator), Chile (S. Heathcote and E. Jehin) and New Zealand (J. Baggaley) detected a strong outburst of meteors from a radiant at R.A. = 192.6 +/- 3.3 degrees, Decl. = -56.0 +/- 1.6 degrees, with speed Vg = 55.8 +/- 1.7 km/s. The shower is called the gamma Crucids (IAU number 1047), but this may have been a return of the alpha Centaurids. That shower was strong in visual observations in 1980.
2021, Jan. 26 - The Volantids returned as expected. A follow-up CBET was issued today describing the CAMS observations. [More here].
2021, Jan. 1 - CAMS did very well in 2020, despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Just compiled the summaries from last year's CAMS data and have the following raw totals: NAMIBIA now 98581, was 18875 in 4 months in 2019, CHILE now 66556, was 51700 in 6 months last year, BeNeLux now 45586, was 42083 last year, LO-CAMS (Arizona) now 44858, was 49749 last year, cams California now 42281, was 69924 last year, CAMS Australia now 31240, was 37837 last year during 7 months, CAMS Florida now 30303, was 24944, United Arab Emeriates Astronomical Camera Network now 24003, was 16085, CAMS Arkansas now 14389, was 13630, CAMS South Africa now 13006, was 9640, CAMS Northern California now 5413, was 4582, CAMS Mid-Atlantic now 992, CAMS Texas now 960, and CAMS EXOSS (Brasil) now 399, was 342. Altogether, the CAMS networks collected about 418,000 orbits in 2020, compared to 364,000 in 2019. [ More here ].
2020, Dec. 30 - Peter Jenniskens reported in a CBET telegram that the Volantid meteor shower has returned this year. The shower is expected to peak on New Year's Eve (UT). If so, southern hemisphere observers may be greeted by the new year with a naturual fireworks display. [More here]
2020, Oct. 29 - Peter Jenniskens issued a CBET telegram describing a peculiar shower detected in 2019 CAMS data. Now named the 29 Piscids (IAU 1046), the shower was briefly detected in the period October 17-19, and then again a month later on Nov 11-18. The stream originated from a Jupiter Family comet. The shape of the orbit and its orientation are the same in the October and November apparitions, so we suspect this is the same stream. The meteoroids move in a very low inclined orbit, almost in the orbital plane of Earth.
2020, Oct. 14 - A strong outburst of a new shower, now called A-Carinids, was detected by all southern hemisphere networks. The radiant is near the ecliptic pole. Tim Cooper deteted the shower visually towards the tail of activity. A CBET was issued.
2020, Sep. 22 - An outburst was detected just above the Hyades. Now called the September upsilon Taurids (IAU shower 1045). A CBET was issued.
2020, Sep. 12 - A new network was added to the CAMS family: CAMS Texas. Operated by Walt Cooney. Thanks to support by Luke Juneau and Dave Samuels, the new network started off with four cameras, two at each location. The sites are near Houston. On September 12, 12 meteors were triangulated.
2020, Aug. 30 - After six years of hosting the CAMS New Zealand station at his private observatory in Geraldine, CAMS NZ founder and well known amateur astronomer Peter Aldous decided he had reached an age where it no longer was safe to climb the roof observatory to maintain CAMS. CAMS NZ coordinator Jack Baggaley found a new site at Mount John observatory, where Nigel Frost has taken over the technical duty of maintaining the CAMS station. The new site had a first clear night on August 30th.
2020, Aug. 21 - Starting on August 18, the CAMS networks picked up meteors that were labelled "chi Cygnids", IAU shower 797. The radiant in August was still in Aquila. This early sighting forwarned a period of activity from this shower, which hadn't been seen since 2015. Indeed, the shower manifested much as expected, peaking in mid September. A CBET was issued and a paper summarizing the 2020 return was written for the journal JIMO.
2020, Aug. 19 - In the evening of August 19, a wildfire swept past Lick Observatory. Firefighters managed to fend off the flames and all but one unused building was spared. However, flames crept up the hill and licked the power conduit of CAMS, melting the plastic cover and cable. CAMS at Lick Observatory was without power while the area remained closed off. Once the smoke cleared, Bryant Grigsby and Peter Jenniskens repaired the damage.
2020, July 27 - Martin Towner reports that CAMS Australia is back online now plugs have been replaced at Curtin University and the power supply of the PC at Bindoon was repaired. The PC was returned by Daniel Busan.
2020, July 25 - Mohammad Odeh reports maintenance of the UACN stations is completed.
2020, July 23 - Marcelo de Cicco reports that three new cameras are contributing data to the EXOSS CAMS network in Brasil. Cameras 1160 (Marco), 1260 (Suzanne) and 1270 (Michael) of the Sao Paulo node are now regularly obtaining orbits.
2020, July 22 - Bryant Grigsby reports maintenance at the Lick Observatory station. Tires of the trailer housing the cameras were inflated. Peter Jenniskens replaced the power supplies to the cameras.
2020, June 19 - CAMS 2010-2016 data were added to the Meteor Shower Portal.
To quickly access those old data, type the date in the top-right "Choose a date" window like "2015.08.12" with points in Chrome, or "2015-08-12" with dashes in Safari.
2020, June 10 - CAMS New Zealand, CAMS Namibia and CAMS Chile detected each a few meteors of a new long-peroid comet shower now called the chi Phoenicids (shower 1036). The shower may be annual. The stream has an inclination of 90 degrees, moving perpendicular to the planet of the planets. Results were announced on CBET 4798.
[Full story]
2020, May 15 - Two new meteor showers were detected today, both caused by long-period comets. Now called the gamma Piscis Asutrinids and the sigma Phoenicids, they were added to the IAU Working List of Meteor Showers as numbers 1034 and 1035. Results were announced on a CBET.
[Full story]
2020, April 29 - CAMS New Zealand detected five orbits of a shower called the rho Phoenicids, visible in video data only just before sunrise in the morning. SAAMER-OS reported strong activity of this shower. Results were reported on CBET.
[CBET telegrams]
2020, April 27 - All CAMS networks reporting the detection of an outburst of h-Virginids caused by a Jupiter Family comet. Tim Cooper reports that the shower can be observed visually. The detection was announced on CBET.
[Full story]
2020, April 15 - CAMS Namibia and CAMS BeNeLux detected significant activity of a long-period comet shower, the phi Serpentids. Seven meteors were detected between solar longitudes 25.21 and 25.39 degrees (J2000). The shower is normally a weka annual shower, but in some years the rates appear to be higher than normal. Calculations by Esko Lyytinen showed that the good years allign with the motion of a dust trail, with the next good year expected in 2027. Results were reported on CBET 4756.
[Full Story]
2020, March 30 - CAMS Australia and CAMS Chile detected the delta Pavonids of comet 1907 G1 (Grigg-Mellish), which was in outburst last year. We published a paper in Planetary Space Science determining the orbital period of the comet based on the meteor observations.
[Paper]
2020, March 13 - CAMS Namibia (T. Hanke, E. Fahl, and R. van Wyk) detected five meteors from the delta Mensid shower between 18h25m and 23h09m UTC on March 12. At the same time, the SAAMER-OS radar system in Argentina reported an outburst of this shower and identified a likely parent body: minor planet 2006 CS. The detection was reported on CBET 4772.
[Full Story]
2020, March 8 - A global pandemic of COVID-19 is underway and calls for stay-at-home and social distancing. Stay safe! We expect intermittent access to the website in the coming months.
2020, January 24 - A bright comet described in a circa 553 A.D. book, "Histories of the Wars", may have been responsible for a brief and unexpected meteor shower in April 2019, so conclude researchers in a paper published this week in Planetary and Space Science. "That comet appears to be on its way back," said meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute. "We don't know whn it will arrive back in the inner solar system, but the meteor shower can help astronomers search for it." [Full story]
2020, January 2 - The year 2019 saw a massive expansion of the CAMS camera network and those behind the scenes (especially Dave Samuels, Steve Rau and Pete Gural) worked hard to keep the network in tip-top shape. As a result, the annual tally of measured meteoroid orbits doubled this year to 360,000!
Orbits measured in 2019 (raw data):
Arkansas (13,630, up from 2,595 last year), Australia (37,837, new since June), BeNeLux (42,083, similar to last year), California (69,924, similar to last year), Chile (51,700, new since July), EXOSS (342, similar to last year), Florida (24,944, up from 5,654 last year), LO-CAMS (49,748, up from 45,230 last year), MA (not in yet), Namibia (18,875, new since September), Northern California (4,582, similar to last year), New Zealand (23,806, up from 3,201 last year), South Africa (9,640, new since June), UAE Camera Network (16,085, up from 10,583 last year).
The year 2019 in headlines:
2019, February 1 - The SETI Institute has received a private donation to help expand the CAMS network. Among the funded projects is regular internet access to Fremont Peak Observatory.
2019, March 19 - Hans Betlem reports that the journal "Radiant, Journal of the Dutch Meteor Society" is available again starting this year.
2019, March 31 - CAMS New Zealand detected an outburst of delta Pavonids of comet C/1907 Grigg-Mellish.
2019, April 11 - Luke Juneau of CAMS Arkansas, and Scott Austin of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, report that a new station has been installed at the Observatory of UCA in Conway.
2019, April 18 - Andy Howell of CAMS Florida and Erika Kisvarsanyi of the College of Central Florida report that the new 8-camera station is installed on the roof of the science building at the College of Central Florida.
2019, April 22 - CAMS BeNeLux detected an outburst of 15 Bootids (shower IAU#923) tonight.
2019, May 06 - Peter Gural and Paul Roggemans report that the new ready-to-use cameras provided by the Global Meteor Network project have been made CAMS compatible.
2019, May 29 - Luke Juneau reports that the Benton station of CAMS Arkansas now has 16 cameras.
2019, May 28 - Dante Lauretta of NASA's OSIRIS-REX project and the University of Arizona are supporting a significant expansion of the CAMS network in the southern hemisphere in the hope of detecting the meteor shower expected if meteoroids ejected from asteroid Bennu move in sun-centered orbits.
2019, May 30 - Lara, Keanu, and Campbell Duncan are hosting CAMS New Zealand's new third station "Ashburton" in nearby Fairton.
2019, June 14 - Martin Towner and Phil Bland of Curtin University report that the first two CAMS Stations of the new Australia network are in operation.
2019, June 24 - An outburst of June epsilon Ophiuchids (shower 459, JEO) was detected by the CAMS camera network on June 19-26.
2019, June 14 - Tim Cooper reports that CAMS South Africa has achieved "first light".
2019, July 13 - Steve Heathcote of AURA/Cerro Tololo Observatory reports that now all three of the new CAMS Chile network stations are in operation.
2019, August 2 - Martin Towner and Phil Bland report that the third station of the CAMS Australia network at Bindoon is now in operation.
2019, August 13 - Andy Howell reports that a new 8-camera station has come online in the CAMS Florida network.
2019, September 10 - The CAMS boxes supporting the HESS experiment are operating as expected. The station in Windhoek is hosted by Elize Fahl, that at HESS by Toni Hanke, and the station in Rehoboth is hosted by Rynault van Wyk.
2019, September 12 - Paul Roggemans reports that MeteorNews now has an article on the record-breaking August observations by CAMS Benelux.
2019, September 22 - Eric Egland reports that the video cables at Fremont Peak Observatory were replaced today.
2019, October 31 - Tim Beck reports that the Kincade fire was stopped less than a kilometer from his home in Windsor.
2019, November 15 - Peter Jenniskens reports that CAMS cameras have detected an outburst of Phoenicids from comet Blanpain since November 12, which may still be ongoing.
2019, November 22 - The alpha Monocerotid outburst ("the unicorn shower") was observed by the CAMS EXOSS network. CAMS Florida (coordinated by Andy Howell) measured the orbits of 49 alpha Monocerotid meteors in 80-90 percent clear skies from 04h38m to 05h37m UTC. The peak time was at 05h02m UTC.
2019, December 12 - Mohammad Odeh reports that station UACN2 is back online at a new site closer to Abu Dhabi.
2019, December 23 - Mohammad Odeh reports that the UACN picked up significant Ursid activity in the night of December 22/23.
READ MORE on these stories in the News Archive below.
2020, January 1 - Happy New Year! Below is the final CAMS map of 2019, showing the natural fireworks on New Year's Eve. It has over 700 meteors plotted. The December Comae Berenicids (29 meteors) are the dominant shower, but several other showers are detected also, including early Quadrantids.
[News archive]
|
Report fireball sightings 
