Meteors are the visible path of small particles, or meteoroids, entering 
the Earth's atmosphere. Though a sizeable fraction of the meteoroids 
originate from the asteroidal near-Earth asteroid population, most are 
the byproduct of cometary activity. 

Since the advent of modern meteor astronomy in the 1830s, the study of 
meteors has been limited to naked eye observations. This was due to the 
unpredictable appearance of meteors and the need to monitor as much sky 
as possible. Recent developments in low-cost low-light security camera 
technology have allowed the production of autonomous meteor monitoring 
systems. Many of these systems have been constructed and operated by 
amateur astronomers. 

In March of 2008, the SALSA program to monitoring meteors over Tucson was 
begun. The camera system uses the Supercircuits PC164CEX-2 camera, which 
has a 1/3" Sony Super HAD Ex-View CCD detector. In conjunction with a 
Computar 4mm F/1.2 C-mount lens, the system detects meteors down to 2nd 
magnitude over a FOV of 50x60 degrees. Real-time detection of meteors is 
accomplished with the MetRec meteor recognition software written by Sirko 
Molau of Germany. The MetRec package is used by members of the International 
Meteor Organization (IMO) Video Network which has dozen of members 
throughout Europe and the southwestern United States. 

Since March 1, 2008, the SALSA camera has detected 5,319 meteors. Of this 
total, 3,458 are Sporadic meteors originating from no particular shower, 
301 originate from the Anthelion source, 455 are Orionids, 155 are Perseids 
while the remainder are associated with known meteor showers. All data 
collected with the SALSA system is reported to the IMO Video Network and 
combined with data from the other systems. The combined dataset is used to 
identify unknown showers and to refine the activity parameters of known 
showers.