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Given the current limited knowledge of meteor plasma micro-physics and itsinteraction with the surrounding atmosphere and ionosphere, meteors are ahighly interesting observational target for high-resolution wide-fieldastronomical surveys. Such surveys are capable of resolving the physical sizeof meteor plasma heads, but they produce large volumes of images that need tobe automatically inspected for possible existence of long linear featuresproduced by meteors. Here we show how big aperture sky survey telescopes detectmeteors as defocused tracks with a central brightness depression. We derive ananalytic expression for a defocused point source meteor track and use it tocalculate brightness profiles of meteors modeled as uniform brightness disks.We apply our modeling to meteor images as seen by the SDSS and LSST telescopes.The expression is validated by Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulations of photonstraveling through the atmosphere and the LSST telescope optics. We show thatestimates of the meteor distance and size can be extracted from the measuredFWHM and the strength of the central dip in the observed brightness profile.However, this extraction becomes difficult when the defocused meteor track isdistorted by the atmospheric seeing or contaminated by a long lasting glowingmeteor trail. The FWHM of satellites tracks is distinctly narrower than meteorvalues, which enables removal of a possible confusion between satellites andmeteors.

Linear feature detection algorithm for astronomical surveys - II. Defocusing effects on meteor tracks