Slashdot Mirror
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. "
I wonder how long it'll be before we see distributed "Search For Comets" apps start popping up...
mailto:<?=implode("@", array("chris", implode(".", array("php", "net"))))?>
Sure, you get your fifteen minutes of fame, but it's only 15 minutes. All these comets are either sungrazers or sundivers.
"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. "
It's not like any of these people can point up in the sky in fifty years time and say "Look Jimmy, you see that fuzzy patch of light in the sky that is about to destroy civilisation? Well I discovered it! That's Anarchofascist-Limo-Taco-9...
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Call me troll, but...
People, part of the fun of "looking for comets, etc." is actually getting off your butt, going outside with your SO, friend, family, what-have-you, and doing it together. Now this is cool, if you would rather spend *EVEN MORE* time sitting on your ass behind your computer. No thanks, I'll grab my telescope and head outside to do this, like I have in the past.
Summary:
crank up your machine, get it running, and then go look outside for yourself.
*Disclaimer: I am at work, it's 4:45am, I'm cranky and there is no reason for me to be here, but I have to be.
-1 troll
Sent from your iPad.
With image recognition, spectrum detection in an embedded system, which can tell that there is possible comet
The people who find the comets probably do not calculate their orbital elements (atleast to the needed accuracy) to determine weather the comet is on a collision path or not. To determine the orbit one needs several observations spanning over a fairly long period of time. Therefore even though you might find a ELE, you most probably would not know about it..
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
This is hardly unusual. When it comes down to it, amateurs do more than 76 percent of virtually everything practical in astronomy already. Professionals frequently work with amateurs to get and confirm results, and a lot of professional astronomers also do things as amateurs (for fun) when they're not working. Then amateurs keep up with the professional findings, and everyone gets something out of it.
Astronomy is probably one of the only sciences left where amateur hobbyists can and do still contribute so much useful effort towards it.
There's just not enough funding for astronomy and space science to do anywhere near everything that can be done. For example, to get time on any big telescope, a professional has to write up a massive report and convince a board that it's worth researching what they want to do. They often have to book it many months or years in advance for possibly one or two nights of viewing. If there are circumstances like bad weather, it's often just treated as bad luck.
That's about the state of professional astronomy. The resources are so limited that there's a massive reliance on data submitted by and work done by amateurs. Professionals can't watch all the sky all the time. Lots of supernovae, comets and asteroids in the past have been discovered by amateurs from their back yard, reported, and confirmed by professionals before (sometimes) being studied further.
I don't know why you'd want to sit in front of a computer studying photographs all the time when you can go out with a telescope. It's so much more fun and rewarding to be actually doing something, and you actually meet people when you get involved, which is more than most people get from sitting in front of a computer. But I probably feel that way because I'm an amateur astronomer.
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 http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/ with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs -Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. Affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there http://www.globaldialog.com/~obsessiontscp/OBHP.ht ml
With all the work being done in image recognition, nobody has come up with anything that does this for astronomy -- with the sheer volume of digital data currently available?