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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.'"
Seems like a cool project, i wonder how it would realy work, would the cameras follow the moon?
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Actually, magnitude 6 is generally the faintest stars visible to the naked eye (under good viewing conditions, of course). Magnitude 6 is where the scale actually comes from. M1 is the brightest stars in the sky. M6 is the dimmest. The modern scale is defined by extrapolating these definitions logarithmically in both directions.
In fact, I can say conclusively that a magnitude 9 flash could be detected in a 14" telescope. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto (max magnitude 13) with a 13" telescope.
However, it is inappropriate for the submitter to compare this project too closely with SETI@home or even Stardust@home. It sounds like the researchers developed this software for their project, and decided to release it as a bonus for enthusiasts. If people pick up on it and find things, great. If not, no major loss. The other @home projects I mentioned depend much more on outsiders.
Whether or not a suburban setup could hope to find anything, I couldn't say.
I did it with a 5" telescope and a moderate-sensitivity surveillance camera from an apartment porch overlooking an flood-lit courtyard in the Washington D.C. suburbs.h ittable.html
http://www.spaceweather.com/meteors/leonids/1999/
You only get the brightest ones (mag. 6) with a set-up like that. 8-12" is quite common, and better video cameras than I used are cheap nowadays. A 14" Schmidt-Cass is within the 'serious-amateur' class. The 'insane-amateur' class is 30 inches and up.