March 27, 2026
UFOs, nerd wars & space rocks
The European AllSky7 fireball network
Meteor-hunting cameras spark UFO jokes, student war stories and a DIY showdown
TLDR: A European camera network is filming meteors and fireballs across the night sky and turning them into a huge online archive, live views and all. In the comments, people swap meteor treasure-hunt stories, joke about UFO sightings, and argue over official gear versus DIY, open-source sky watching.
The European AllSky7 fireball network quietly launched a sky‑watching page full of live views and flaming space rocks… and the internet instantly turned it into a cosmic comment party. One user, clearly still buzzing from their uni days, dropped a full adventure story: back in Berlin, a professor predicted where a meteor would land, students rushed to the site like a sci‑fi treasure hunt, and everyone combed fields for fragments of space rock. Suddenly this camera dome isn’t just tech – it’s a launchpad for real‑life meteor quests.
Others went straight for the UFO angle. After seeing the fireball clips, one commenter basically said: yeah, now I get why people swear they saw flying saucers. The archive of bright streaks and glowing blobs is turning skeptics into, at least, “ok, maybe I’d call 911 too” people. Meanwhile, the nerd wars began in the background: one user started nitpicking frame processing and “noise reduction,” while another crashed in with a hot DIY take, flexing an open‑source setup that runs on a cheap Raspberry Pi and can spit out artsy star‑trail videos. The unspoken drama: official network with fancy domes and a copyright warning vs. hobbyists rolling their own sky cams for fun, glory, and better timelapses.
Key Points
- •The European AllSky7 network provides live status, equipment details, live and weather views, and archives of recorded fireballs, with media protected against commercial reuse.
- •AllSky7 systems, manufactured by Mike Hankey, use seven NetSurveillance NVT cameras with SONY STARVIS IMX291 sensors and 4 mm f/1.0 lenses to cover the full sky.
- •Cameras record at 25 fps with ~45×80° FOV, ~4 mag limiting magnitude, and ~25 pixels/° resolution; five are at ~25° altitude, two at ~70° (north and south).
- •Systems use PoE and a single CAT-6 cable to a Mini PC running Ubuntu and AllSky7 software, recording SD and HD streams and analyzing them asynchronously; ~5,000 meteors/year are detected in central Europe.
- •AllSky7 software (free for network members) provides filtering, astrometry, photometry, and multi-station trajectory/orbit calculations; in 2022, AllSky7+ added an 8th fisheye camera for full-sky capture and improved photometry.