Spectral observations at the Canary Island Long-Baseline Observatory (CILBO): calibration and datasets

Abstract

The Canary Island Long-Baseline Observatory (CILBO) is a double-station meteor camera setup located on the Canary Islands operated by ESA's Meteor Research Group since 2010. Observations of meteors are obtained in the visual wavelength band by intensified video cameras from both stations, supplemented by an intensified video camera mounted with a spectral grating at one of the locations. The cameras observe during cloudless and precipitation-free nights, and data are transferred to a main computer located at ESA/ESTEC once a day. The image frames that contain spectral information are calibrated, corrected, and finally processed into line intensity profiles. An ablation simulation, based on Bayesian statistics using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method, allows determining a parameter space, including the ablation temperatures, chemical elements, and their corresponding line intensities, to fit against the line intensity profiles of the observed meteor spectra. The algorithm is presented in this paper and one example is discussed. Several hundred spectra have been processed and made available through the Guest Archive Facility of the Planetary Science Archive of ESA. The data format and metadata are explained.