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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."
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.
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 ||
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
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.
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..
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
The folks at Yale were not the only ones looking at the sky that night. SpaceWeather.com has some links to other images here.
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.
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.