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Ultimate Webcam: Rent Time On A CCD Telescope
leighklotz writes "I saw an ad for this in Science News and visited the site: http://www.arnierosner.com offers CCD-based telescopes that you control, from his mountaintop in Arizona. $50 for an hour's tiem gets you started. Too bad I hadn't read this last week when Saturn's rings were at their peak." I bet this gives some entrepreneurial ideas ...
Wow! This will revolutionize the desktop background industry! Talk about Innovative!
Forget that! Does something like that have the resolution to peer into my hot neighbour's shower? :-)
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
It's okay, they took the pictures for you... http://www.arnierosner.com/ccd/wallpaper/saturn/ (Actually those are older, sometime before Oct. 11, but they're still sweet.)
If the only telescopes he has are the ones in the picture there, its not much to write home about. The largest looked like about 8 inch aperture. I understand this is probably more aperture than alot of people have (I have a paltry 4.5), but then I always thought the fun of astrophotography was going out and spending all night up taking your own pictures. Braving the cold for 10 hours sure can be rewarding when you get your finished product.
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Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
There are plenty of astronomical phenomena which you cannot get pictures (at least not good ones) available for free. If you're a serious amateur astronomer (as this caters to), and are interested in investigating a particular area of space in detail, you need some damn good photos.
Damn good photos are not available to public, and they are not cheap. Professional astronomers pay hundreds of dollars for a few shots of an eclipsing binary system they may be studying. If you're an amateur who wants this kind of thing, its simply not available.
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There are actually dozens of robotic telescopes that you can rent time on. Kitt Peak has had rental scopes accessible in various ways, including through Software Bisque's software for years. Amateurs have even built their own robotic telescopes and placed them in dark locations, then run them via the internet or dialup (actually just as good for single users)
I live about 40 miles east of this guy. The skies out here at night are amazing. I live in Tucson, which is the nearest big city, and which is also close to Kitt Peak, a renowned observatory. Due to the importance of Kitt Peak, Tucson has strict outdoor lighting ordinances. Lights have to face downward, certain types of lights are prohibited, etc. As a result you have pretty good star views even in the middle of the city. And it also means that his scopes don't suffer light pollution problems (40 miles may seem like a long way, but you can see the lights of Phoenix clouding the sky from 100 miles off) from any city lights. You get just a little out of town, and you get fantastic viewing. We also don't get clouded over very often.
Haha, I feel so sorry for the sucker who rented the time slot while this article is on Slashdot's front page. Do you get a refund if the site gets Slashdotted while it's your turn?
He should be right in the middle of this map:
map.
The images you reference sure look an awful like this one taken by the Hubble. You too can flip one of them 180 degrees and put your name on it if you like.
Or possibly some lame excuse like the laws of physics. Look up Dawe's limit sometime. Oh heck, I'll do it for you...
The Dawes Limit gives the maximum amount of detail that can possibly be seen with a particular aperture (size) of telescope.
If you want to to calculate Dawes Limit for yourself you can use this simple formula: R' = 4.56/D. In this formula, D is the diameter of the main lens (aperture) measured in inches and R' is the Dawes limit given in arc-seconds.
Let's see... I'm guessing the lander is maybe 5m across. The moon is 384,400,000 meters away. That gives an angular size of 0.003 arc seconds. So in order to resolve it we need a diameter of 4.56/0.003=1520 inches = 126 feet. Currently our biggest telescope is 10 meters.
If you happen to find and get time on a 126 foot diameter scope, and your time is on a perfect night on the top of a mountain with no moisture and totally steady skies, you'll be able to resolve the lander as one single pixel. If you want to be able to image it as something recognizable you'd better look for a 500 foot diameter mirror.
And if we did manage to image it and convince the goofs that it wasn't a fake image, they'd say "OK, fine, you got a craft there but we don't believe it was really manned."
This is why people ignore the conspiracy theorists. It's like banging your head against the wall; unless you invent a time machine and put them on the rocket in 1969 they won't believe it.
If anyone does put them on the rocket, I suggest putting them on the outside.
Actually $50/hr. is a pretty good deal. The three scopes, their mounts, and the ccd camera systems are worth about $75,000 -$100,000 total. Combine that with his location which has excellent seeing in excess of 80% of the time and you have a prime system for some real serious deep sky work. Most people don't realize how difficult astrophotography is. During the exposure which can last anywhere bewteen seconds and hours depending on the magnitude (brightness) of the object being imaged, the scope must track the object without any vibration or error as the earth rotates (less than .000005in. at the mount). In addition to this, these scopes must have perfect goto systems, any error and the user will have a zero chance of being able find where the scope is pointing too. The ccd cameras on these scopes are top self stuff, depending on exactly which cameras he has, they cost anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000. The peltier cooling systems on the ccd cameras would make most over clockers droole. The ccd chip temperature must be maintained +- .5C or better and at 0C or below to maintain image and data accuraccy plus the temperature must be ramped down and back up at a rate which will not destroy the ccd chip. Also since these are robotic ccd camera scopes, they must be focused by software control. Put the whole system together and you have some very serious computer hardware and software. By the way, this guy has a roll off observatory building, that's why the scopes appear to be in the open. You still have plenty of time to enjoy Saturns rings for at least another year; meteor showers are viewed best with the naked eye, a scope has too narrow of a view to catch them; and no you can't or even Hubble see the flag on the moon. It would take something bigger than the Twin Kecks in orbit.m This stuff is actually computer geek heaven!