I was a founding member of the UK Meteor Network (UKMON) and currently serve as one of the managing committee members. Exeter Observatory hosts two dedicated meteor camera on the network and every night they are monitoring the night sky and detecting, recording and analysing objects that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. In partnership with the Global Meteor Network, UKMON plays a major role in the scientific exploration, tracking, recovery and analysis of meteors and meteorites.

UKMON was established in 2012 as the first meteor detection network in the UK. Since then, the team of astronomers grew to 200+ and ultimately played a vital role in the successful recovery of the Winchcombe meteorite, now on display in Natural History Museum.

In 2023, we collected around a million individual detections and calculated 100,000 orbits.

This much data requires some serious computing power to match observations across the network and triangulate observations to extract orbital data and ground tracks. We use cloud computing to achieve this, with a massively parallel compute engine running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

The two meteor detection cameras at Exeter Observatory are designated UK0020 and UK0021 and you can see the latest detections from the observatory (updated daily) on the Global Meteor Network website here: Latest Meteor Detections Scroll down the GMN website to see UK0020 and UK0021.

Below are typical example of one nights data from the Exeter cameras.