How do cameras catch shooting stars?
Special cameras point at the sky all night and record any moving streak of light. Computers spot the meteors and save the videos for scientists.
Around the world, there are cameras watching the night sky every clear night, waiting for shooting stars and fireballs. They are part of fireball networks.
How they work. Each camera usually has a fish-eye lens that sees the whole sky at once, like a giant eye. It records video or takes pictures all night long. A computer connected to the camera watches every frame. When it sees a streak of light moving across the sky, it saves that clip.
Working together. When two or more cameras in different places record the same fireball, scientists can use the different views to work out exactly where the fireball was in the sky, how high it was and how fast it was going. This is like how your two eyes help you judge how far away something is.
Finding meteorites. If a fireball was big enough to drop meteorites, scientists can calculate where the pieces probably landed. Then searchers can go and look. The Winchcombe meteorite in England was found in 2021 partly thanks to cameras like these.
Where it came from. Scientists can also trace the fireball's path backwards into space, finding where the rock came from, usually the asteroid belt.
Some schools and families run their own sky cameras and share the results with scientists.