Fireball network
A fireball network is a group of automatic cameras spread across a region that record bright meteors to calculate their paths and orbits.
A single photograph shows a fireball's direction across the sky but not its height or distance. Add a second camera tens of kilometres away and the meteor can be triangulated, giving its true path through the atmosphere. A fireball network is a set of such stations, usually automated all-sky cameras, watching the whole night sky over a region.
Networks reveal two things. Projecting the path forwards and modelling dark flight gives a search area on the ground. Projecting it backwards gives the meteoroid's orbit, showing where in the Solar System it came from. The first meteorite with a photographically determined orbit was Příbram, an H5 chondrite that fell in Czechoslovakia on 7 April 1959; that success led to the European Fireball Network. More recently the Desert Fireball Network in Australia and the UK Fireball Alliance have helped recover meteorites, including Winchcombe in 2021.
You can recognise a network fall by the detailed trajectory and orbit published with it. Many networks welcome volunteers who host a camera, and public sighting reports still add useful detail.
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