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

Wow, I wish I had...

[posterlogo]

...a "backyard" 14 inch telescope. These things aren't exactly amateur telescopes even though they are certainly available commercially. Take a look at the pic of that thing in the article. It's a professional grade Schmidt-Cassegrain housed in its own observatory. I know there are a lot of enthusiasts out there, but not too many of them have these 14" suckers, let alone a pair of them. So... not really amateur, but I'm glad they're publicizing these cool observations.

Buzzword baiting

[Duncan3]

While I love the required buzzword baiting, distributed data collection that's used in this project really has nothing to do with distributed data processing projects like SETI@home. At least this project is looking for something real.

And a large home telescope and related equipment isn't exactly a free download either ;)

So why compare them?

Re:7th to 9th Magnitude? Good luck

[pease1]

You don't even need to RTFA to know it's beyond most of our equipment.

I can step on to my back porch, well inside the glow of the Washington DC mega-plex and less then a mile from a overly-lit Honda dealer and record the brightness of 7th magnitude stars with a 20 year old pair of 10x50 binoculars. I hit 13.3 regularly with a 12-inch reflector about 30 foot from a (shielded) street light.

The hardware described isn't all that uncommon. All you geeks need to get out from in front your Wii's and visit a star party put on by a local astronomy club. You'll see SCT's from 8 to 14-incher's quite often. People sink this kind of money into hobbies all the time. The guy across the street picked up a pair of Jet-ski's for $15k. Another guy on the street has $20k into a camper.