On the development of robotic CCD video meteor observing station in Spain

Abstract

Since 2006 the SPanish Meteor Network (SPMN) has set up several automated video stations in Spain for increasing the atmospheric cover-age of the already existing low-scan-rate all-sky CCD systems [1, 2]. However, in spite of their initially thought complementary nature, high-sensitivity CCD video cameras have provided very valuable informa-tion related to meteor activity [2, 3, 4] and, so, these systems have been continuously improved and new video observing stations have been setup along the country [5]. A significant improvement has been re-cently made with the development of new software dedicated to robotize the whole observing process. This has been very useful, for instance, in order to operate fully autonomous video meteor observing sta-tions from remote locations or to handle the huge vol-ume of data provided by these systems.