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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.
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.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
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.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."