i looked at this and think it is better suited for UAP or "stuff" observations. the more UFO centered sites are UFOhunter and UFOstalker. (you need to zoom in on the maps to see the full detail.) i have not used either, but i believe there is talk to create cellphone apps that people can use to make quick reports that in turn can be pushed out to other users to confirm.
i don't know how effective or helpful that can be, but it suggests that people are casting around for literally any idea to assist in increasing citizen observations and the reliability of citizen observations, which is of course why i posted here.
the two things that strike me after a really exhaustive review of "UFO" videos available online is (apart from the hoaxes, which are often fun and clever) are that most people are not at all familiar with observing the night sky and make obvious misattributions for what appear to be ordinary things, and most people have no idea how to operate a video recording device to minimize tremor, focus and track accurately.
again, amateur astronomers are a little more adept at things optical, astronomical and photographic, and seem (to me at least) to represent a potentially very important cadre of citizen witnesses.
This again in many ways shows significant points.
UFOcapture has been used in Japan and mainland Europe and Brasil using multiple station sites having equipment paid for voluntarily by true citizen scientist and often mounted at their homes. No one pays them, they add it to public databases freely. Granted, costs mean personal affordability, but probably cheaper than most here have spent on a telescope. Of course, some pre-processing of data has to be done, it isn't all automatic, however that's not unique either, variable star people do it all the time, DSO of both DSes (deep sky and double star) people stack their images to get the best image, and some use video style imaging and wade through their frames. Planetary imagers especially so.
For things like UFOcapture to work you need at least two stations within a certain distance of each other. The start height and end height of meteors can then be parallaxed. You'll say that's not likely to happen, but it has happened for meteors at relatively limited cost outlay, done by people who are really interested, maybe ufo people are only interested in going "ooooh! means something" and conspiracy theories and re-interpretation of anecdote and written word like a fundamentalist reads any religion's scripture whilst ignoring the rest of reality?
UFOcapture is unfortunately misnomered, it is not always clear what Japanese people mean when they use the USA English loanwords they like, as it is not necessarily what we think, although its original source may have been more akin to what we think. For instance, 'yankee' doesn't mean someone from the USA, it means a loud and ostentatious person, from anywhere nowadays. A more aggressive person can be alluded to as a 'rambo', and I've heard that 'full monty' is popular with them too, which is a UK English loaned word. In fact, the few I've heard of or come across over the years increasingly seem to be related to so called pop-culture.
So, you need a bunch of interested people to set up some networks, use some software like ufocapture that already does the image processing stuff for you (of course, you have to learn how to use it, and plenty of people can afford to run websites on "ufo" stuff and go around spending personal time collecting "data" for evidence. Others have a spare few quid from their books and/or documentaries they could chuck into the pot, or could at least publicise it with a nod. And the data would be public and amenable to the scientific community to critique. Of course if they failed to identify some strange phenomenon, it'd be "ooooh!", even if the phenomenon remained unidentified. Unidentified appears to instantly mean [insert twilight zone theme tune here] to many, when it actually means unidentified, ironically enough.
But all these people can't setup an easy network like this?
And then you go on about there must be enough on cameras out there.
Well there is.
The orbit of the Chebalynsk meteor and its likely strewn field came a lot from dashcams, and even if the cars had no gps, the streetview of the cams image could be used to get the lat long, and was.
The strewn field of a recent Gloucester meteor was accurately defined using doorbell cams of all things! Of course you know where the house is. However you also know what time an image was taken and smartphones have a spying gps or cell tower interpolator to figure out where you are and what you are up to in most countries (not for the governments to spy on you, worse, the "big evil corporates" who don't want to supress your freedom, just that of the freedom of your spending habits. Without these corporates and new technology I doubt big money advertising would have survived much into the 21st Century, as we've become inured to it).
Most of the chewy amateur network data used by the NHM (Natural History Museum) came from UKMON, which if I remember rightly uses UFOcapture (although to be honest I do get it confused with NEMETODE, another UK one. Why they haven't merged for more coverage I dunno).
But you seem to dismiss ufocapture out of hand.
Your topic was the SCIENTIFIC etc.
However, your responses are full of "but"s and geared towards evidence based on unscientifically acquired and assessed data.
GMN, Global Meteor Network, amateur, though possibly with pro guidance, and SETI CAMS, definitely with pro guidance, intend to do as allsky as possible every clear night monitoring, almost exclusively, if not exclusively, with volunteers, many of them amateur, or if connected to something academic the meteor stuff is their hobby not their discipline.
SETI CAMS amazes me, as SETI can be seen to manage a load of drivel at times, like pointing at M13 about 13,000 lightyears away and sending a signal. What was all that about? I'll eat my words when the reply comes on my 26,100th birthday...
I dunno, I'm preaching to the unconvertable, and you'll do what you want.
However, your topic word was SCIENTIFIC, and when folk try to aid you in that area, all we get is "but" and "it would be nice if". It's doable now! Has been for some time. Just no interest. Allsky imaging is becoming standard and frequent at several magnitude ranges. Ask apass for all their images so you can get someone to write a script to wade through them.
The odd youtube video doesn't cut it. In the UK some years ago the two, now elderly, once the little sisters of the fairies at the bottom of the garden image of around the early 20th Century finally admitted it was a hoax done by some bloke who knew their family. The papers made a big thing of this, whereas the rest of us kind of went "oh, it's a fake is it, what a shock". Although most folk will have actually never have heard of it, as pop-culture changes every two minutes nowadays, not on decade long or multi-decade intervals.
Go for it. Scientifically. What you're on about with youtube etc is tantamount to conspiracy theory games, not scientific discourse.
