Geminid Explosions On Moon Visible To Amateurs

saskboy writes "The ET scanning project SETI@Home was wildly popular, and the mock project Yeti@Home much less so, but soon there will be a chance for the enthusiastic amateur astronomer to combine those two scanning techniques and spot explosions on the moon with simple telescope and camera equipment at home." From the article: "'On Dec. 14, 2006, we observed at least five Geminid meteors hitting the Moon,' reports Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. Each impact caused an explosion ranging in power from 50 to 125 lbs of TNT and a flash of light as bright as a 7th-to-9th magnitude star... 'The amazing thing is,' says Cooke, 'we've [caught explosions] using a pair of ordinary backyard telescopes, 14-inch, and off-the-shelf CCD cameras. Amateur astronomers could be recording these explosions, too.'... [NASA will] soon release data reduction software developed specifically for amateur and professional astronomers wishing to do this type of work. The software runs on an ordinary PC equipped with a digital video card. 'If you have caught a lunar meteor on tape, this program can find it.'"

Comments

Re:Wow, I wish I had...

[Smitty825]

Heh...I was thinking the same thing. A local camera/telescope dealer sells a slightly newer version of the scope shown in the article for $6,500. That is out of the price range of many "backyard" astronomers.

More detail on NASA's Lunar Impact Monitoring

[Scott7477]

Go to this link.
    The header blurb is as follows:

LUNAR IMPACTS

Mission statement: Use Earth-based observations of the dark portion of the moon to establish the rates and sizes of large meteoroids (greater than 500 grams or 1 pound in mass) striking the lunar surface.

Why it is important: The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) eventually calls for extended astronaut stays on the lunar surface. Spacecraft, vehicles, habitats, and EVA suits must all be designed to withstand the stresses posed by the harsh lunar environment over this period of time. Meteoroids, and the ejecta produced when they create impact craters, are part of this environment. "

Essentially NASA has an Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory that continuously is watching the Moon.

Then they: "attach an ASTROVID StellaCam EX camera to each of our telescopes, and route the camera output into a Sony tape deck, which converts the video signal into a digital format that is stored on a hard disk. After an observing session, we look for flashes in the data. Our first impact was found by someone simply looking through a couple of hours of video. This can be quite tedious, however, and tired humans can easily miss a short impact flash, so custom computer software was developed to look for the flashes. If one is found, additional software is then used to extract detailed information on the flash -- its brightness as a function of time (light curve), where it was seen on the moon, if it was due to a meteor shower, and so forth. Using this information, we can estimate the mass or size of the meteoroid."

This seems to indicate that they've already got the system working.