Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Comet Hunting For The Masses

Posted by chrisd on from the scientific-progress-via-idle-hands dept.

khendron writes "In this article in Wired the most awesome past time is described. Comet Hunting. On you computer. No more cold nights outside with the telescope. Sit back with a cola, fire up the broadband, and start looking." From the article: "Amateurs looking at the SOHO images on the Web have found 76 percent of the 428 new comets that have turned up in SOHO images. Of the 31 people who have discovered comets, 21 of them are amateurs. They come from 10 different countries, including Australia, Great Britain, Germany and China. "

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. SOHO is democratization of comet hunting by scattol · · Score: 4, Informative
    Ok, Apparently few of you actually tried to find a real comet at a real telescope freezing your but outside. Real hunting has the following problems:
    • Poor weather (especially in the North East) means that you can't observer frequently enough to have good odds of being the first one to see something because you will be clouded out far too often. Truly serious comet hunters move to Arizona to have enought clear skys to have good odds.
    • Today most comets are found by professional searches such as linear with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs
    • Equipement maybe affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there. Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. That's the trend in recent amateur discovery such as comet Petriew
    • to find stuff that faint you need to be several hours out of town to get a dark enough sky becuase you work in a big town to affoard all the equipement. Avoiding light pollution is essential to see stuff that faint so you can't do it often enough

    So SOHO is actually a playing field leveler in that sense and makes comet discovery more accessible than before. Sure the is less glory that doing it the old fashion way. It's free, always good weather, timely data. It's also the only legitimate way to get your name in the heavens instead of buying stars which is nothing more than a scam IMHO. So, sure, it's sure a much bigger kick to find one at the eyepiece but a SOHO one still counts in my book.

  2. Re:15 minutes of fame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Hi,

    I wrote the article. you're almost right about never being able to see the comets again. about 10 percent of the comets found in SOHO images do not appear to be on a collision course with the sun. So there is a chance they'll make it around again. Unfortunately, the short format at Wired forced me to leave out a lot of details like that. For example, most of what is being spotted are known as Kreutz comets, which are the shards of a huge comet (perhaps 100 miles across) that disintegrated sometime in the relatively recent past (less than 20,000 years). They are all coming in on the same trajectory.

    regards,
    jeff benner