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Yale Students Capture Asteroid On Film
netringer writes: "Two Yale University students used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before it made a close flyby of Earth. The still images were made into a cool digital movie that shows the asteroid streaking across the sky over a period of two hours. According to an AP story the students were supposed to looking at some binary stars when they decided to look a the asteroid instead."
How does one capture an asteroid on film? Seems like it would break right through it. I mean, afterall, it's hurtling down from space, so it's going really fast and it's really hot.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I also took a picture of the asteroid about to hit earth... Here it is
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
That's not what it looked like in Armageddon.
It seemed to be keeping time to "blue Suede Shoes" too, but that's probably just a coincidence. Probably...
The state of near-earth asteroid detection is pretty pitiful. We need years of warning if we're to divert an asteroid, not days.
Asteroid hunting should be part of the basic curriculum for astronomy programs, if it isn't already. Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
I could do this in MS Paint and Adobe Premiere in a half an hour... what the heck. Move a white pixel across a grey background...
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Making "still images" into a digital movie. Back in my day, if we wanted to see heavens, we had to use Galileo's original telescope model from 1610! And we didn't have movies; each frame had to be hand drawn and the whole stack had to be manually flipped to create motion. Kids today!
--
"All art is quite useless."
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
I could animate some gifs that look more realistic than that movie:-) But I would add an explosion or something at the end to scare people:-) (and some space ships) Very cool though!
keanmarine.com
Finally, astronomy for people such as myself with small attention spans. This is huge! It's just what the science needs to gain entire new audiences.....whoah! Something shiny!
foreach $frame (0..100) {
$image = newImage(128, 128);
$image.plotRandomStars();
$image.plot(10 + $frame, 10 + $frame);
$image.write();
}
Here is a link offering more info on NY40, and some more info here. And there is a video here.
Kids who don't do what they're told and know how to use a telescope? Why, next they'll be using the telescope to plan the trajectory of ICBMs!
Their professors should report them under the TIPS program, especially in the event of a student holding a temporary visa, to ensure a quick, appeal-free exile.
A slightly higher quality movie is available at astropage Slashdot them too!! lol.... You know someday the government is going to start calling the slashdot effect a weapon of mass denial..
you're welcome ;)
ny40.gif no worries about that evil closed source software now is there? LOL..
CLS
SCREEN 13
REM ASTEROIDS ROOL~!
FOR i% = 1 TO 320 STEP 1
PSET (i%, 150)
NEXT i%
END
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
here is gif of the same in case you dont like quicktime ;-) hurray
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
It plays just fine in xanim. IIRC the source for xanim is available.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Xine plays quicktime movies now.
... resembles a small asteroid passing through Earth's atmosphere.
Do you like German cars?
The folks at Yale were not the only ones looking at the sky that night. SpaceWeather.com has some links to other images here.
http://astrowww.astro.indiana.edu/personnel/strom/ saturn/
Contains movies of Saturn's moons that I made back when I was a grad student.
...to everyone who commented on how faked the movie looks.
Yes, you could do the same with photoshop... Or better, just look at Star Wars. But most asteroids (and most everything within the solar system other than the planets) are nothing more than little dots on a black field. Contrary to popular belief, much of astronomy is not about pretty pictures.
As for the stars not moving, I'm not familiar with the set up of the Kitt Peak telescope, but they most have some sort of sidereal rate drive motors installed. There isn't much astronomy one can do with a streak.
Nice job for some students, but enough for national press attention? Slow news day for slashdot, I guess.
I can see how it all transpired now...
"No guys, I said we should use the telescope to check out pieces of ass...but I guess this is cool too."
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Yes, telescopes track the sky. They have to, because astronomers like to look at really faint things, so they have to expose for a long time.
If the telescope has an equatorial mount (like the 0.9 m WIYN telescope they used), then you don't get any field rotation while tracking. A horizontal mount (like almost all recently-built telescopes have) does give you field rotation, but the computer can simply counter-rotate the detector to correct for it.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
. . . and they were on a long-ass observing run and decided it would be fun to take some exposures of the asteroid. The movie on the NOAO site doesn't really do the original images justice, but our sysadmin won't let me put up a larger animation in order to see if our system can survive a slashdotting.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Well then color me ignorant. Good info, thanks.
It's a bowling ball! Didn't anyone else spot the finger-holes?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
... it's considered REALLY bad form to not stick to your proposed research project on shared telescopes where you have to apply for time. I don't know how the WIYN handles proposals, but the general KPNO one from a few years back wanted (among other things to justify the scientific program) your target list, etc. While you have control over what gets observed at the time of observation (because seeing conditions change and might cause you to shift priority), switching over to something else "just because" could result in your NOT getting time the next time you want it!
:-) When they found out I was a grad student working on my thesis, they were really REALLY nice about it.)
(I got extra lucky once and got an extra night on the 0.9 Coude Feed because the people scheduled next cancelled! The hardest part was convincing America West to let me change my no-change no-refund ticket that this was an insanely improbable circumstance - I kept telling them that it was easier to win the lottery.
For the curious, are are some factoids about that telescope.
* It has a pretty nice stereo system, but not as nice as the one at the 3.5m telescope (Klipsch speakers!)
* There is NO film involved. This telescope has been purely digital for quite a while.
* It was the KPNO 0.9m until it was sold to the WIYN (Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale and NOAO) consortium. since NOAO runs Kitt Peak, this means that the telescope used to be 100% accessible to US astronomers, and now 60% of its time is dedicated to observers at WI, IN and Yale (which is cool for them!).
* As off the last time I checked, it boasts shared use of the biggest digital camera on the mountain: 8192 x 8192 pixels (on 8 2048x4096 chips)
* It was built in the early 70's IIRC. It is run by a PDP-11 with Forth software.
* For some of it's computer parts, there are no more spares anywhere. When they die, it's upgrade time.
* It is right next to the WIYN 3.5m telescope
* The dome roof gets frozen open or shut in the winter sometimes, despite being in southern Arizona.
* I spent about two weeks at that telescope, about half of which was cloudy...
* Here's the type of picture that 8192x8192 camera can take (before a lot of postprocessing): the Orion Nebula (shrunk to 1270x948) http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/thesis/trap.gif
* It's a fun telescope to use.
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Furthermore, no actual ivy league student would be this fucking classless.
Actually, after a few drinks most Ivy League students are just as classless as any state schooled kid. And yes, we do have grade inflation, same as almost all prestigious colleges right now. Yale provides a superior education only to those students willing to work for it. The rest just have well-padded resumes.
true.
i refine my earlier post.
none of the ivy league students that actually post to slashdot would be this classless.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
The NASA page he cites says the plan is to map all the major near Earth asteroids by 2008. How is this pitiful? If extinction class rocks hit us every 10^7 or 10^8 years, how much time can we budget to defend ourselves against the next one? What if it took 10^2 years? Would that be an unreasonable amount of time to be confident we had detected most of them?
The rock last week was about 100 meters in diameter. Tunguska is estimated to have been 60 meters in diameter. Since the mass goes up as the cube of the diameter this one would have been about five times as powerful as Tunguska. The planetary.org article I linked to says one that size strikes us every couple of millenia. Is this program a failure if we can't detect and divert the next Tunguska sized rock? The article says the Tunguska strike was as powerful as the blast from a 16 megaton H-bomb. It said it devastated 2000 square kilometres. That would be a square about 42 kilometers on a side. Ie. Bigger than Monaco, smaller than NYC.
16 megatons? Rick Green's glossary of cold-war terms defined a "small-theatre nuclear exchange" as "Curtains for the actors after just one act, hence the prefix 'small theatre'". Sure, this could be devastating for lots of people, if it too didn't land somewhere relatively deserted, like northern Siberia. But civilization would survive, even if it landed on Hollywood.
The planetary.org article said 25% or more of the rocks that have hit Earth may have been long period comets. Figuring out how to detect and deflect long period comets that might hit the Earth would be much more difficult. Maybe so much more difficult we shouldn't waste any resources trying?