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by Daniel Martins

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Fireballs in the sky? If they're out there, Dr. James Whitehead wants to know.

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The St. Thomas University professor was in town Thursday to install a special "all-sky" movie camera onto the roof of the French Fort Cove Eco-centre that will track meteors as they burn up in the atmosphere.

While he hopes the data gathered will help his research into meteorite impact craters, that is not the camera's main purpose.

"Ultimately, it's an outreach project," he said. "It's to encourage high school kids to get interested in the space science aspect."

The foot-tall roof camera, linked up to a computer within the eco-centre, will scan the night sky for any bright objects that stand out against the static stars, hopefully meteors, and track their movements.

Most of the the footage it records will be deleted, but if a meteor is spotted, it will save a recording of its passage, as well as a series of still images.

The data from the camera will be compared to images taken from three other cameras in Halifax, Saint John and Fredericton.

"It's probably a darker sky than you've got in Fredericton, and there aren't quite as many lights out here as in the centre of town," he said of the Miramichi location. "Also, we want the cameras as spatially separated from each other as possible."

He hopes the network will eventually include a fifth camera in the Edmunston area.

"If there's a big fireball, there's usually a big meteorite to it, so we need more than one camera to be able to work out where the meteorite may fall," said Whitehead, who hopes the system will be able to help them find a meteorite if it does survive to reach the ground.

The camera itself cost less than $200, and its internal transformer will keep it warm enough to melt any ice or snow that covers it during the winter. The computer that monitors the data was donated by the provincial health ministry, while Miramichi company Shadcomm sponsored the wiring. The entire project was also aided by a grant from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of New Brunswick.

Whitehead says the images will be made available to high school and university students interested in astronomy and space science with the help of Fredericton's interactive Science East, of which Whitehead is a past president.

High school professor James MacDonald, formerly of Miramichi Valley High School and soon to start at James M. Hill, is also involved in the project. He had originally planned to apply through the provincial Education Department for funds for an astronomy course, but was put in touch with Whitehead.

He said he is looking forward to using the projects' videos and still images of meteors blazing across the sky to spark the interest of astronomy-minded students.

"I'm going to ... introduce high school students to research ... what we do, looking at images, which ones are good, which ones we'll throw away," he said.

"I want to get students out and involved a bit more. That's where it's really interesting, instead of just sitting [with] a book."