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Comet Hunting For The Masses
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. "
Now Anyone Can Discover a Comet
By Jeffrey Benner
Warning: This website can trigger an obsessive search for comets.
In offices, dens and dorm rooms around the world, a geeky band of hunters are desperately scouring the site for comets. A German student likened his interest to addiction. A father of three in Britain, who has found 132 comets, is reluctant to admit just how much time he spends on his quest.
The unknown comets are turning up in the background of photos of the sun taken from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, a satellite in orbit around the sun. Dozens of amateur astronomers from around the world scour the images for the wispy tail of a comet, racing to be the first human to ever lay eyes on a particular glowing ball of ice hurtling toward the sun.
Sebastian Hoenig constantly pores over the SOHO images, sometimes for 16 hours a day. Since he started visiting the SOHO website in December 2000, he has found 18 comets and he's gunning for more.
"Searching for comets has become like addiction," said Hoenig, who studies astronomy and physics at Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany. A competitive speed skater, he compared discovering a comet to victory in sports. "When you realize that no one else has ever seen it before, it's like winning the gold medal: great feeling."
Launched in 1995, the SOHO observatory is a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency. The primary purpose of the mission is to study solar activity. The discovery of hundreds of new comets -- more than 400 have been found so far -- has been an unexpected perk.
The undisputed champion among amateur SOHO comet hunters is Mike Oates, 45, a father of three from Manchester, Great Britain, where he runs an electroplating business. With 132 comet discoveries to his name, his tally is nearly triple that of second-ranked Xavier Leprette of France, who has found 50 comets.
Oates, possessed with the same compulsive thirst for discovery that drives Hoenig, has spent more hours looking for comets than he cares to admit.
"I would not like to give any exact figures," he said. "But at my peak, I have my computer downloading images for at least 12 hours a day, with about half that spent directly image processing and searching."
When Oates started plowing through the SOHO archives to find images taken before the website went live -- a clever tactic his rivals hadn't thought of -- he really started to pile on the comet credits. He considers these archival finds particularly satisfying. "There is just that little extra thrill of discovering comets that have been missed by the professionals," he said.
Doug Biesecker, a scientist who works on the SOHO project, said his team didn't plan on amateur astronomers playing such a huge role in picking comets out from the chronograph images. But when they started posting the images on the Web in 1999, the e-mails started to roll in.
Nearly all the messages came from people who had mistaken a star, or planet, or imperfections in the photos for comets. But a few people were really onto something. "They started to find objects we were missing," Biesecker said. "We realized (help from amateurs) was an important tool we could use."
Biesecker set up a special website and reporting log for the comet spotters. Once Biesecker verifies a discovery, he reports the new comet and its discoverer to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at Harvard, the world's official recorder of celestial discoveries.
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.
The comet hunters agree that the spirit of competition is a big part of the allure. Nearly all the comets they find are tiny shards of rock and ice, doomed to evaporate in the sun's atmosphere days after they are spotted.
"There's not great science coming out of us discovering these comets," said Rob Matson, a systems engineer from Newport Beach, California. "But there's a thrill of the hunt." Matson has yet to bag his first comet, but he spends about ten hours a week trying.
But the competition is friendly. Hoenig has built a website to help newbies get the hang of comet spotting and comet-master Oates has one too.
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.
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