We are bringing up a network of RMS cameras in New Mexico, USA. We were fortunate to have seven cameras installed in time to catch one clear night of this year’s Geminid meteor shower. Four of the cameras are in the Albuquerque area (us0001, 2, 6, and 7). Cameras us0008 and 9 are located a bit south in Los Lunas, NM, and our southernmost station (so far) is us0003 in Socorro, NM. Some of our cameras are quite close to the Albuquerque airport, so a lot of plane tracks can show up along with meteors. I have filtered out the worst of the plane tracks,and created stacked composite images of our night-long recordings.
These cameras are operating at around 1500m elevation, so sky glow is not nearly as bad as might be expected with the large population in the Albuquerque metro area. All-in-all,we are very impressed with our RMS IMX291 cameras fitted with 4mm f0.95 lenses.
The table below shows station ID, number of fits files stacked, the number of fits files discarded due to plane or “bug” tracks, then station owner and location:
| Station ID | # fits files | Discards | Owner / Location |
| us0001 | 1235 | 144 | P.Eschman / Albuquerque, near airport |
| us0002 | 639 | 54 | P.Eschman / Albuquerque, near airport |
| us0003 | 948 | 64 | D.Klinglesmith / Socorro,NM |
| us0006 | 576 | 82 | S.Kaufman / Albuquerque, NE Heights |
| us0007 | 838 | 51 | R.Hufnagle / Albuquerque, North |
| us0008 | 139 | 0 (some plane tracks remain) | S. Welch / Los Lunas, NM |
| us0009 | 1070 | 94 | S. Welch / Los Lunas, NM |
Here are composite images from us0001, 02, 03, 06, 07, 08, and 09:
We were fortunate to get such great results so early in our learning process. We hope for more great images in the future, some really nice bolides, and maybe even some stuff that reaches the ground.
Thanks for looking, Peter Eschman, Albuquerque, NM
