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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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...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.
I was target shooting with my satellite game. Nothing to worry about.
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?
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So they will be looking for exploding Yeti on the moon? I would pay good money to see that, but I dunno about the scientific value.
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You don't even need to RTFA to know it's beyond most of our equipment. The /. summary says "7th to 9th magnitude", so you know you probably can't see them. The stellar magnitude scale goes brighter the lower the number, and it's logarithmic. The sun is about -26, the moon -12, and Saturn is about a 1. Theoretically, in a very dark rural area, you should be able to see 7th magnitude items with a modest aperture (say 4 - 6 inches.) But it becomes logarithmically more difficult at higher magnitudes like 8 and 9, so those of us in any suburban setting already know that we won't see anything. The only saving grace to the article is the suggestion that the software will notice the strikes, even though the astonomer won't.
Magnitude descriptions
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/icq/MagScale.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
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IANAAA (I am not an amateur astronomer), but $6.5K really isn't that much to spend on your favorite hobby. Just think how much you've sunk into antique cars, shop tools you really don't need (or a shed/garage for your shop), high-end stereo or video gizmos, or even just video games and your "rigs" over the years. The fact that you can pick one of these up at the local camera store suggests that this isn't even "high end" backyard astronomy equipment.
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 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.
If these explosions are as bright as a 7th magnitude star (6th magnitude can be seen with the naked eye with good vision), you wouldn't need a 14in telescope to view them. Probably something like a 6 inch scope would do for the brighter incidences (although not the 9th magnitude).
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.
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14" telescopes aren't typical. 8-10" is a good piece of kit. Most backyard scopes are smaller (though that's a mistake if your primary interest is astronomy). I've got 2 8" scopes and a 10". Only one of the 8" scopes are suitable for photography. I wouldn't consider a 14" scope right at the moment. Apart from the cost they're bulky and harder to move. Realistically this is for hard core amateurs and astro clubs to do, not anyone with a telescope and a camera. Setting up such false expectations typically puts people off.
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record the brightness of 7th magnitude stars
Yes, that's the point. It's not stars you're looking at, where you're eyes have time to filter out noise from ambient light. You're "looking for split-second flashes" (from TFA, second-last paragraph.) This is why they're promoting their software, which can do the watching for you.
The hardware is quite uncommon, actually. I'm in Auckland, NZ right now, pop 1.1 million, and the number of telescopes beyond a 12-inch aperture in the city is probably between 200 and 300. Of those, maybe 2/3 will be in the hands of amateur astronomers. You'll also need a good CCD, a computer good enough to run their program, and a location from which you can track the moon for several hours without interference. That puts it far beyond most of the people in the clubs around here.
I hit 13.3 regularly with a 12-inch reflector about 30 foot from a (shielded) street light.
How shielded? If you're facing within 90 degrees of that streetlight, you should have light reflected off the inside of your tube, giving you light polution near your secondary reflector. That's like looking at the sky at dusk. How can you see anything beyond M9 or M10 in those conditions?
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.
Again, the point of the article is that lots of amateurs can help find these strikes; a distributed effort, so they can watch the moon from a myriad different angles, 24/7. The observatories already have better equipment than we do, so why would they bother asking for help from the amateurs? It's the different locations they're looking for, which can't be supplied by observatories (or a star party, where we're all clustered together in one location.)
Oh, and to the post that says Actually, magnitude 6 is generally the faintest stars visible to the naked eye (under good viewing conditions, of course), that's not a contradiction to what I wrote. Recall that the logarithmic scale means M7 is about 2.5 times harder to see, putting it beyond naked eye, and beyond most pocket binoculars (because of the small aperture. "pease1"'s binoculars gather a lot of light - rated at 50 - which is why he can see M7 easily.) M8 is 2.5 times dimmer than M7, and so on, so unless you're lucky, you could be looking for something very, very dim.
P.S.: M1 was meant to be the faintest star visibile to the nake eye, but Sirius is listed as -1.7, so the scale's off a bit.
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