As the sun set on a September evening, Jupiter and its four moons glowed brightly in the Eastern sky through the lens of a telescope near Thomas Ashcraft's home.

On many nights while his neighbors slumber, Ashcraft is viewing and listening to the galaxy over New Mexico from his homemade observatory near Eldorado. He captures images on video and sound via radio waves. As a fireball passes over Earth or Jupiter, it appears as a brief bright light on the screen of one of the Mac computers in his observatory, which looks a lot like a converted storage shed. The sound of the fireball is a high-pitched tone that trails off a few seconds after the fireball is no longer visible.

Ashcraft, a master craftsman-turned-artist and astronomer observer, documents fireballs blazing into Earth's and Jupiter's atmospheres. Two weeks ago, he videotaped the bright path of a major fireball that appeared in the sky south of Albuquerque and disappeared somewhere between Taos and Ocate. Hundreds of people across the state saw the burning object as it crossed the sky at
9:05 p.m. Sept. 21.

On the north end of the observatory's roof is a white canister about 4 inches in diameter and 1-foot tall. This is the Sentinel, a near infrared, low-light hypersensitive experimental camera on loan to Ashcraft from Sandia National Laboratories. The camera's fisheye lens gives Ashcraft a view of the entire state, plus a bit of northern Mexico and Southern Colorado. Sandia has dozens of these cameras placed with volunteers around the West, plus Canada and Mexico. It is the camera he used to capture images of the recent fireball.

The camera gives him a live feed from dawn to dusk of fireballs crossing within a few hundred miles. He doesn't have to rewatch the entire night's tape the next day to identify fireballs — Sentinel is triggered by light. With a few quick button strokes, Ashcraft can skip to each "light" event recorded by the camera. Sometimes it is lightning. Sometimes it is a passing car light. But every couple of days, he's rewarded with a fireball flaring across the computer screen.

"Every night, I record 130 gigabytes of 30 frames-per-second video," Ashcraft said. "Out of that night's raw file, I extract the meteors for archiving and dump the bulk of the file for a fresh night's recording."

He has 15 terabytes of saved files from his work over the years.

Ashcraft's little observatory is laden with wires, radios, a VHS recorder, three laptops and a bookshelf lined with books on astronomy, bacteria and sundry other topics. A sign on the bookshelf reads, "Sovereign Microbe Nations Pavilion" and is signed with his moniker underneath — Heliotown. Rows of coin-sized rectangle and round metal medallions imprinted with fossil-like designs line a wood bench near one laptop. Ashcraft made them.

"I'm an artist and a metal smith. That's how I make my living," said Ashcraft, sporting a gray beard and long, braided hair.

His art now is a byproduct of science and culture. He passes his audio recordings of the cosmos through a spectrograph to create a visual.

In 2008, he set up his radio equipment and antennas at the Center for Contemporary Arts and gave visitors a chance to hear Jupiter's sounds. He called it Harnessing Wild Electricities from Outer Space.

"We were exploring something otherly," Ashcraft said, adding, "We're in this frontier where there's no language."

For that show, he dubbed himself, an artist, as "electroreceptor."

His big project now is designing and building a prototype Jovian fireball telescope capable of tracking sounds and visuals of fireballs on Jupiter at the same time. His system right now consists of a 21 MHz radio array and a 254 mm Schmidt-Cassegrain f/10 telescope. It is on a mount that tracks Jupiter through the night. "I'm cobbling it together," he said. "I do radio astronomy, anyway. My niche in the science world is putting together radio observation with visual observation. Nobody seems to be doing that.

"Visual astronomers and radio astronomers tend not to merge," he added.

Jupiter rotates every 9 hours and 56 minutes. When the inner most moon crosses any of four regions on the planet's surface, it causes radio bursts. "I monitor and capture those," he said.

His dual-radio-recording system allows him to capture the crackling constant noise of "space dust" and the higher whine of a passing fireball. It's matched to a recording logged in WWV time, the continuously-transmitted radio signals of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"That creates a tight scientific document," he said.

Whether tracking fireballs near Earth or Jupiter, Ashcraft uses what he calls a "poor person's radar" to track fireball sounds. With a radar, when a meteor passes through the atmosphere, it pings back. "I don't have a radar. I'm using a method called forward scatter (or meteor scatter)," he said. "When a meteor strikes the ionosphere, it makes a cone of ionization as it bores into the Earth's atmosphere. As long as that ionization is coherent, the meteor will reflect in a far off television transmitter. So you will get in this case pings from the video carrier waves."

Ashcraft didn't grow up fascinated by the stars visible from his Springfield, Ill., hometown. He didn't start stargazing during his years building looms and other finely-crafted tools in the Ozark Mountains. Only when he moved to New Mexico 22 years ago did his passion for planets and fireballs begin. "This is a sky place for me," he said.

When he started recording fireballs, he used VHS tapes. "I have boxes and boxes of tapes showing meteor showers dating to the 1990s," he said.

As computer technology grew more sophisticated, he switched to digital recordings, but still uses VHS for the audio.

He caught the attention of the U.S. Air Force in the mid-1990s when a large fireball was headed for Apache Ridge, Colo., sight of a strategic command center. "They freaked out. They didn't know what it was," he said.

Aschraft had captured the radio signature of the fireball, marking its exact time and magnitude.

He put it out in the public sphere as he does with all his recordings. "The Air Force got in touch with me and asked me what instrument I was using," he said.

Now he's a "known observer." His video of the Sept. 21 fireball was shown by spaceweather.com and went viral.

He's happy to hear from other observers. "People are welcome to call me when they see something they think is a fireball," Ashcraft said.

To see and hear more of Ashcraft's fireball videos (and one of an owl landing on the Sentinel camera), as well as other projects he's working on, visit www.heliotown.com.