  Given the current limited knowledge of meteor plasma micro-physics and its
interaction with the surrounding atmosphere and ionosphere, meteors are a
highly interesting observational target for high-resolution wide-field
astronomical surveys. Such surveys are capable of resolving the physical size
of meteor plasma heads, but they produce large volumes of images that need to
be automatically inspected for possible existence of long linear features
produced by meteors. Here we show how big aperture sky survey telescopes detect
meteors as defocused tracks with a central brightness depression. We derive an
analytic expression for a defocused point source meteor track and use it to
calculate 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 photons
traveling through the atmosphere and the LSST telescope optics. We show that
estimates of the meteor distance and size can be extracted from the measured
FWHM and the strength of the central dip in the observed brightness profile.
However, this extraction becomes difficult when the defocused meteor track is
distorted by the atmospheric seeing or contaminated by a long lasting glowing
meteor trail. The FWHM of satellites tracks is distinctly narrower than meteor
values, which enables removal of a possible confusion between satellites and
meteors.
