I agree to disagree. I've built many telescopes over the past 20 years and almost always build them cheaper then I could have bought them.
There are more manufacturers out there, now. That's a good thing since people who don't have the time can at least get in the hobby and even contribute to science.
And anyone who complains they aren't into astronomy because they live in the city and have to deal with light pollution, doesn't understand the hobby, the science and the technology completely.
You can build your own telescope, your
own CCD camera, and a cheap PC to run it and do some great science
and take some great
pretty pictures all from a very light polluted area.
Pony Express for Sat. Imagery
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2
Recent edition of
Space News has a cover story about how, after DoD bought exclusive rights to high res commercial imagery of Afghanistan, for a while, Pentagon folks had
drive across DC (lame summary only), burn the data to CD's and then fly the CD's out the theater for regional use. Kudos for getting the job done, but ouch!
Actually, many serious amateur astronomers have played with webcams over the past few years. I played with a Logicom quickcam on a homebuilt 4-inch Reflector a couple years ago. By 2003 I'll have it mounted on a homebuilt 12-inch scope to image Mars.
I first played with CCD's on telescopes in 1987. It has come along way since then; in fact some early amateur astronomers turned image processing software developers have even contributed serious advances in image processing.
1. tear up the Kyoto protocols
2. allow oil drilling in Alaska.
There was a lot of support for tearing up Kyoto - certainly it was not roaring loud - after it learned how unfair it was to the US.
"But there have been plenty of previous large scale studies (the IPCC, for instance), so I can't allay the suspicions that he's going to keep commisioning research till he gets the result he wants."
Your statement does a good job of expressing some my feelings: if global warming was such a fact, there wouldn't be any question that other studies would come up with anything different. After reading Micheals, I just see too, too, too many signs that much of the current paradiem surrounding global warming is based on miminal data, incomplete and immatural models and a certain level of junk science that has been carefuly interwoven with public scare tactics via the mass media.
I haven't understood Europe's rabid acceptance of global warming, so perhaps I need to study UK politics more than I have.
"Actually, if the Bay Area Fox and NBC affiliates are anything to go by, the UK gets better coverage of US politics than parts of the US."
Yeah, you don't get any good coverage of US politics via ANY TV media. Period, although National FOX is getting better. To really understand US Politics you need to go alternative. I've listened to BBC and read a few UK papers from time to time; they present US politics much better than US media does. If you really want to start to understand US convervsatives (note I didn't say Republicans) you need to invest many hours into Rush and Sean Hannity. Just listening for a couple of hours won't work. A lot of US libs make that mistake.
"Having said that, I'm a particular Amerophile. Not only do I follow US politics, but I can explain the infield fly rule."
Hell, I have a hard time with that, although my wife can do in her sleep! I'll claim rare (in the US) knowledge of 18th century Brit scienists.:-)
That's one piece of $148 million increase to some NOAA offices.
And that's only NOAA, let alone NASA and other US agencies that do climate research.
Sure, it's not the billions that some would want, But it is not what one would expect if you just listen the mainstream "environmentalists".
Not a hidden agenda, but not the outright gutting that some would have expected. This is a typical Bush move: he's about right if both sides are screaming.
Conservatives in the US aren't as anti-environment as many would believe. In local politics, area Republicans are beating the pants off Democrats (in a strongly liberal state) partly because they are out in front in environmental issues.
Strange, eh?
Observation: few Yanks would claim to begin to understand UK politics, but I have repeatedly run into Brits who think they understand US politics. Wonder why that is?
Either, UK or US. Here in the US I've dealt with some climate researchers who will privately express reservations about GW. But to speak out publicity would doom their research budget and likely their career. Even Bush's recent proposed budget gives a healthly increase for climate research.
Besides, if you read Satanic Gases, all he really does is use reviewed papers to make the point that the warming isn't happening as fast as originally stated (he doesn't claim it isn't happening) and that warming could have as many good as bad effects.
maybe its because he's in the pay of ICE,the largest group in US lobbying on behalf of the fossil fuel producers."
No different then being employeed by a government that is politically motivated to push global warning in order to garner the support of Greenpeace and similar organizations.
So do you know if Micheals says global warming is taking place or not?
So your premise is that we can't trust peer-reviewed science but can trust published politically-motivated polemics that aren't reviewed at all?
Micheals makes an interesting case. There is a nasty feedback loop in a small, tightly knit group of reviewers who all rely on each other for approval of government funding.
Why the automatic assumption that Micheals is "politically-motivated"? Perhaps he's just a pissed off scientist because his research has to pass a much higher bar because his findings aren't politically correct and aren't "normal."
Read the book. He makes the point that his own work is better for it and it actually strengthens his case.
While you are at it, also read Kuln also. Pay special attention to the part about "Normal Science."
Many believers are beyond hope. It is like religon to them.
For a real understanding of why, government researchers, EPA, NOAA, NASA, IPCC and most peer reviewed reports and data on global warming can't be trusted read:
Several years ago I picked up a
Davis Instruments
Weather Monitor II. Back then, there were only a couple of home weather stations on the market. The cost was about $500 with various sensors.
Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.
The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.
I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.
The WMII has been a fun little toy...
An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.
If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:
Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
Wireless support;
Varity of sensors for the station;
Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.
Get a pair of decent bincs (if you lose interest in astro, they are still very usefull);
Learn the sky. Be willing to travel out to dark skies. This takes AT LEAST a year!
Find and join a local astro club. Find these on the net... many astronerds are just that... nerds. There were more astronomers on the net in the early days...
Get active in the club, go out observing with them, astroheads aways want to show off their hardware, so you can get lots of chances to try before you buy;
Be patient: imaging is hard work, takes a pretty good investment and can become "work" pretty quickly;
Don't be blind to building your own scope with collected parts... sort of like putting together a PC. It's fun, it's entertaining, you know it, you can fix it, you love it. Lots of good groups around the web for this;
Read all the old Sky and Telescopes and ASTRONOMY magazines you can find. Check them out of a local library and read, read and read. Read everything, including the ads;
Don't get sucked in to the idea that "more expensive" is better. You can do some serious science or just have great fun with some of the cheap hardware;
I'm in my 21st year of amateur astronomy and still going strong... it's a blast. See:
Apparently in the distant past, there was at least one impact event on Mars that was large enough to have thrown a good amount of Martian material into solar orbit. The Earth has sweep this material up over the ions and some of the pieces have survived entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
A good bet for the impact location on Mars is the Hellas Basin region. Because this is a low area on the surface of Mars, it is often covered with frost and can be pretty easy to see with a telescope at certain times.
If you look at a
globe of Mars, it is interesting to realize that the massive volcanos of the Tharsis region is directly on the other side of the planet. In the image above, Hellas is the big crater to the lower right, Tharsis is left of center - look for four big "mountains."
A nice map as you see Mars in a telescope with markings labeled is
here
And my
drawings of Mars.:-) I have a friend that owns
a hunk of one of the known Martian rocks. Every
now and then he lets me hold it if I buy him a beer.
These rocks have a chemical make up that is completely different then any other meteorites found on Earth. Chemical studies of Martian soil
done by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970's comfirmed that these rocks come from Mars.
The IRS has an amazingly complex process for processing their data into the different centers around the country. They like to very tightly control who has access (for good reason) to send them data, both for quality control and security.
Nonetheless, what is proposed might be possible. I worked at an govt. agency in 1995/6 that developed a web interface to allow filing of EZ1040's and 1040a's and from some popular tax programs. We tested end-to-end - from a browser and a tax product into IRS's mainframe systems. Total cost was something like $30 million.
The project was killed by Congress, specifically by Congressman Ted Stevens. He used GAO to nitpik the system to dealth on technical details (PKI wasn't really around back then) and rapid development/procurement practices used by the project. The GAO Report is
here. But hell, we did it in six months!
We used GM at a past company I worked at. The execs and sales guys loved it, all the techies hated it.
We had a consultant who was pretty knowledgable about the internals of GM and he had moved us to the version that supported SQLserver, so we looked into building a simple front end. The consultant had a really hard time getting information about the structure of the DB and it was clear there were some really weird things happening between the client and the DB... the more we looked the more we realized there were dependies between fields that weren't in the DB, but managed by the client.
We gave up and just used email. A really great example of why closed systems suck.
I guess if I was to believe all the crap that's been written here, I shouldn't even be reading./ since I'm currently a government employee.
I jumped out of govland to do the dot.com thing a couple of years ago. It was a great experience.
After the dot.bombed, I did some time as a govt contractor. Fun work, if you get it without a clearance. I found most of the folks I was working with (other contractors) to be pretty good... no worse then the bottom of the barrel folks we hired at the dot.com because of labor shortage.
I've just recently jumped back into govland. In general, the other civil servants I'm working with (for an entire week) have been very interested in my dot.bomb experience and seem to respect it.
Unless you've done time in govland, as a contractor and in a dot.com environment, I don't know that you can be qualified to say much.
For a project that is geared towards non-professionals, see the Internation Space Station Amateur Telescope Project. It is being designed and put together with volunteers from around the world with the help of the Astronomical League... and they need ALL the help they can get.
Slashdotters should get involved and use Open Source to help make it happen.
Meteor photography is usually done with a 35mm camera, a normal or slighly wider then normal lense, some 400 or 800 ISO film, a tripod and a cable release.
It helps to be under dark skies, as that will allow longer exposures and increase the chance you will catch a meteor. Exposures of 45 seconds to 20 minutes work well, but if you are light polluted, your exposure time will limited because the film will get fogged by the light pollution.
CCD's aren't normally used for meteor imaging unless you are trying to do some sort of movie. The key here is that the shutter needs to be open for more than a few seconds... most webcams not only don't support this with the software out of the box, but many of them aren't capable of doing it at all.
CCD's also get "noisy" over time and need to be cooled if used for long exposures. This can be done with a peltier cooler, water/air/ice/whatever. This also greatly increases the senstivity of the CCD. For a collection of good books about this, see this page and this one about building your own CCD.
Using a telescope to image meteors costs you more than not. A telescope - in this case, you are using it as a telephoto lense - sees a smaller piece of sky and greatly reduces the chance a meteor will pass in front of the detector/film.
Sorry, but it's not my telescope or image and I don't do any serious CCD imaging with the scopes that I do have:-)
Nonetheless, amateur built CCD's can do pretty amazing things - they can go deeper with a with a couple of minutes of exposure time then the 200-inch Hale Telescope could using film in 1970. Here's a good example, look at these
images of extremely faint Globular clusters taken with a homemade telescope and CCD camera.
Some of these objects weren't recorded on the Palomar Sky Survey!
Understand, ground based telescopes aren't a replacement for space based telescopes, if not just because of the bandwidth issues ground based scopes face. Nonetheless, ground based professionals and amateurs are recording data that was believed to have been the sole terrority of space based telescopes when HST was designed, built and launched.
NASA's smart by building NGST to primarly work in the IR ranges.
Oh, BTW, Jupiter and the moon are easier to image then Saturn because they are brighter and larger...:-)
I didn't mean to imply the amateur image was better, just that it's pretty amazing what you can do with some off the shelf hardware, a little dough and a lot of sweat and practice.
If you were to compare the amateur image to ones taken during the age of film - only 15 years ago, it is possible to see just how far things have come.
Ground based astronomy will never replace space based work, if not just because of the bandwidth limitations of ground based work.
Image processing and cheap CCD detectors have REEEEALLLLYYY improved astro-imaging from the ground. In fact, it's restarted a dead line of astronomy: studing images instead of spectra and other forms of data.
Amateurs are doing amazing stuff.
Here's an image of Saturn taken with an amateur 13-inch scope and a camcorder. It's compared side-to-side with a similar HST image. You will be surprised.
Dozens of amateurs joined in a program to supply images to the 2001 International Marswatch program during this past Martian observing season. The pros use these images to decide when to spend their valuable HST time to look at Mars. Some of the images (and visual drawings) are incredible.
One thing that did not make any sense was when Gene Hackman called the aircraft carrier a "boat."
Wow... in watching the ads for this movie on TV, I've dismissed it as another stupid attempt by Hollywood to make a war movie.
This makes me think they actually did some homework: yes, aircraft carriers are called "the boat" by those who work on them. Spent five years on one of those pig boats. More water then you'd ever want to see. The longest trash lines you'd ever want to see also.
"Kick ass and press on" - Capt Leighen Smith, USS America, 1984, Indian Ocean cruise
Interesting, but YOU can do this...
on
Virtual Astronomy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As an amateur astronomer who has contributed to various research papers with professionals over the years, I have a number of friends who have been mining SOHO, , IUE, HST, MASS and other astronomical data archives for a number of years. Most have made some discoveries, usually in the form of new objects, clusters or comets. It's time consuming, and sometimes a bit mind numbing, but very doable for anyone with a decent machine and net connection.
Works even better if you run Linux and can get IRAS running and have a good display, especially if you want to fool around with the Hubble archives. Professional astronomers have been doing their research on unixes for 20 plus years. Tools are available for the asking and most professionals and grad students are willing to help out an amateur who is serious. Linux brings, to an amateur, the same desktop power, but at a very low cost.
Astronomy is one of the few hard sciences where an amateur can contribute serious work, either with nothing more than a telescope and a webcam to digging into the very numerous digital archives that are available for free.
And to add to that, there is a long, long, tradition of amateurs and professional astronomers working together. For a great example see theAmerican Assoc. of Variable Star Observers.
Peaked at about 1400 per hour from Thorofare Mtn Overlook (3,600 feet)
on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park (about 90 miles west,
southwest from Washington, DC) around 4:30 EST. Clouds/fog about 1000
feet below did a good job of blocking the light pollution from below,
perhaps adding a quarter to half limiting magnitude to the skies.
Long and bright, short and bright, dim and short, exploding flashers,
point source flashers, long ones that changed brightness as they skipped
along, it was quite the show. Beat the 1998 show by quite a bit, if not
because it lasted for four+ hours instead of the 45 minute tease we got
in '98. Still not 100,000 per hour, though [:-)]
Before the main part of the show started, showed about 50 people M-42 and Saturn through my 20-inch dobsonian, many of which had never looked through a telescope before. Had spent the hours between 10pm and 2am chasing down some faint galaxies.
The overlook was gridlocked with cars by 4:30. By 5:30, cars were
parked on both sides of Skyline drive and perhaps 500 people were at the
overlook. Even as twilight overtook the sky, you could see bright
meteors flashing across the western sky. Many stayed to watch sunrise
over solid clouds as far as the eye could see.
Slashdot Mirror
There are more manufacturers out there, now. That's a good thing since people who don't have the time can at least get in the hobby and even contribute to science.
And anyone who complains they aren't into astronomy because they live in the city and have to deal with light pollution, doesn't understand the hobby, the science and the technology completely.
You can build your own telescope, your own CCD camera, and a cheap PC to run it and do some great science and take some great pretty pictures all from a very light polluted area.
Recent edition of Space News has a cover story about how, after DoD bought exclusive rights to high res commercial imagery of Afghanistan, for a while, Pentagon folks had drive across DC (lame summary only), burn the data to CD's and then fly the CD's out the theater for regional use. Kudos for getting the job done, but ouch!
I first played with CCD's on telescopes in 1987. It has come along way since then; in fact some early amateur astronomers turned image processing software developers have even contributed serious advances in image processing.
If you want to hack a really cool system, see how to build your own "Cookbook" cooled CCD camera and the related Cookbook camera website.
2. allow oil drilling in Alaska.
There was a lot of support for tearing up Kyoto - certainly it was not roaring loud - after it learned how unfair it was to the US.
"But there have been plenty of previous large scale studies (the IPCC, for instance), so I can't allay the suspicions that he's going to keep commisioning research till he gets the result he wants."
Your statement does a good job of expressing some my feelings: if global warming was such a fact, there wouldn't be any question that other studies would come up with anything different. After reading Micheals, I just see too, too, too many signs that much of the current paradiem surrounding global warming is based on miminal data, incomplete and immatural models and a certain level of junk science that has been carefuly interwoven with public scare tactics via the mass media.
I haven't understood Europe's rabid acceptance of global warming, so perhaps I need to study UK politics more than I have.
"Actually, if the Bay Area Fox and NBC affiliates are anything to go by, the UK gets better coverage of US politics than parts of the US."
Yeah, you don't get any good coverage of US politics via ANY TV media. Period, although National FOX is getting better. To really understand US Politics you need to go alternative. I've listened to BBC and read a few UK papers from time to time; they present US politics much better than US media does. If you really want to start to understand US convervsatives (note I didn't say Republicans) you need to invest many hours into Rush and Sean Hannity. Just listening for a couple of hours won't work. A lot of US libs make that mistake.
"Having said that, I'm a particular Amerophile. Not only do I follow US politics, but I can explain the infield fly rule."
Hell, I have a hard time with that, although my wife can do in her sleep! I'll claim rare (in the US) knowledge of 18th century Brit scienists. :-)
Page 5 of the NOAA Budget Request fact sheet collection (PDF alert).
That's one piece of $148 million increase to some NOAA offices.
And that's only NOAA, let alone NASA and other US agencies that do climate research.
Sure, it's not the billions that some would want, But it is not what one would expect if you just listen the mainstream "environmentalists".
Not a hidden agenda, but not the outright gutting that some would have expected. This is a typical Bush move: he's about right if both sides are screaming.
Conservatives in the US aren't as anti-environment as many would believe. In local politics, area Republicans are beating the pants off Democrats (in a strongly liberal state) partly because they are out in front in environmental issues.
Strange, eh?
Observation: few Yanks would claim to begin to understand UK politics, but I have repeatedly run into Brits who think they understand US politics. Wonder why that is?
Either, UK or US. Here in the US I've dealt with some climate researchers who will privately express reservations about GW. But to speak out publicity would doom their research budget and likely their career. Even Bush's recent proposed budget gives a healthly increase for climate research.
Besides, if you read Satanic Gases, all he really does is use reviewed papers to make the point that the warming isn't happening as fast as originally stated (he doesn't claim it isn't happening) and that warming could have as many good as bad effects.
No different then being employeed by a government that is politically motivated to push global warning in order to garner the support of Greenpeace and similar organizations.
So do you know if Micheals says global warming is taking place or not?
Micheals makes an interesting case. There is a nasty feedback loop in a small, tightly knit group of reviewers who all rely on each other for approval of government funding.
Why the automatic assumption that Micheals is "politically-motivated"? Perhaps he's just a pissed off scientist because his research has to pass a much higher bar because his findings aren't politically correct and aren't "normal."
Read the book. He makes the point that his own work is better for it and it actually strengthens his case.
While you are at it, also read Kuln also. Pay special attention to the part about "Normal Science."
For a real understanding of why, government researchers, EPA, NOAA, NASA, IPCC and most peer reviewed reports and data on global warming can't be trusted read:
Satanic Gases
The author also debunks the myth that global warming would actually harm us. It is a little dated, but still a great read. Very technical.
Follow it up by reading some of Micheal's other recent articles:
2002 where he shows that even some of the original governemnt scienists are coming around.
What a waste of resources.
Eight years later, it's done ok... the biggest problem is the wind sensor gets hit by lightning and it frys the station. The last time this happened, two years ago, I put off repairing it ($75) until I remount and properly ground the anemoneter (wind sensor). This will be one of my summer projects.
The humidity sensor dies every now and then, but Davis almost always replaces it for free. The biggest problem with that is where I mounted it; too high for regular access - I have to borrow a ladder.
I've pulled Cat5e to the attic and I'm about ready to deploy a "weather cam" pointed northeast out of an attic window so I can display realtime images. As the weather station comes back online, there are a number of windoze products out there that will log and create HTML pages with the data coming out of the WMII.
The WMII has been a fun little toy...
An underlying theme is the mounting of the sensors. Every location will be different, but can be a pain. The newer wireless sensors are very appealing, since you could mount them away from a house and not face some of the height/access problems you encounter on a roof top.
If I were to start over, I'd look at the now much richer market place like this:
- Available/tools/programs for logging, saving and making web pages for a station;
- Wireless support;
- Varity of sensors for the station;
- Warrenties given even the sensors get beat up and have to repaired/replaced;
- I'd favor products that have open, published data standards; Davis doesn't that I know of. Apparently third party products have reversed engineered the data stream.
Pease 1You expect weather forecasts to be right?
Learn the sky. Be willing to travel out to dark skies. This takes AT LEAST a year!
Find and join a local astro club. Find these on the net... many astronerds are just that... nerds. There were more astronomers on the net in the early days...
Get active in the club, go out observing with them, astroheads aways want to show off their hardware, so you can get lots of chances to try before you buy;
Be patient: imaging is hard work, takes a pretty good investment and can become "work" pretty quickly;
Don't be blind to building your own scope with collected parts... sort of like putting together a PC. It's fun, it's entertaining, you know it, you can fix it, you love it. Lots of good groups around the web for this;
Read all the old Sky and Telescopes and ASTRONOMY magazines you can find. Check them out of a local library and read, read and read. Read everything, including the ads;
Don't get sucked in to the idea that "more expensive" is better. You can do some serious science or just have great fun with some of the cheap hardware;
I'm in my 21st year of amateur astronomy and still going strong... it's a blast. See:
My homemade scopes;
My drawings of Mars - many made with a small 4-inch telescope.
Good luck!
A good bet for the impact location on Mars is the Hellas Basin region. Because this is a low area on the surface of Mars, it is often covered with frost and can be pretty easy to see with a telescope at certain times.
If you look at a globe of Mars, it is interesting to realize that the massive volcanos of the Tharsis region is directly on the other side of the planet. In the image above, Hellas is the big crater to the lower right, Tharsis is left of center - look for four big "mountains."
A nice map as you see Mars in a telescope with markings labeled is here
And my drawings of Mars. :-) I have a friend that owns
a hunk of one of the known Martian rocks. Every
now and then he lets me hold it if I buy him a beer.
These rocks have a chemical make up that is completely different then any other meteorites found on Earth. Chemical studies of Martian soil done by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970's comfirmed that these rocks come from Mars.
There are lunar meteorites also.
Nonetheless, what is proposed might be possible. I worked at an govt. agency in 1995/6 that developed a web interface to allow filing of EZ1040's and 1040a's and from some popular tax programs. We tested end-to-end - from a browser and a tax product into IRS's mainframe systems. Total cost was something like $30 million.
The project was killed by Congress, specifically by Congressman Ted Stevens. He used GAO to nitpik the system to dealth on technical details (PKI wasn't really around back then) and rapid development/procurement practices used by the project. The GAO Report is here. But hell, we did it in six months!
I think IRS is still gun shy on the issue.
A must read for both sides: The Satanic Gases.
We had a consultant who was pretty knowledgable about the internals of GM and he had moved us to the version that supported SQLserver, so we looked into building a simple front end. The consultant had a really hard time getting information about the structure of the DB and it was clear there were some really weird things happening between the client and the DB... the more we looked the more we realized there were dependies between fields that weren't in the DB, but managed by the client.
We gave up and just used email. A really great example of why closed systems suck.
Good luck!
I jumped out of govland to do the dot.com thing a couple of years ago. It was a great experience.
After the dot.bombed, I did some time as a govt contractor. Fun work, if you get it without a clearance. I found most of the folks I was working with (other contractors) to be pretty good... no worse then the bottom of the barrel folks we hired at the dot.com because of labor shortage.
I've just recently jumped back into govland. In general, the other civil servants I'm working with (for an entire week) have been very interested in my dot.bomb experience and seem to respect it.
Unless you've done time in govland, as a contractor and in a dot.com environment, I don't know that you can be qualified to say much.
Mileage will vary ALOT
Slashdotters should get involved and use Open Source to help make it happen.
It helps to be under dark skies, as that will allow longer exposures and increase the chance you will catch a meteor. Exposures of 45 seconds to 20 minutes work well, but if you are light polluted, your exposure time will limited because the film will get fogged by the light pollution.
CCD's aren't normally used for meteor imaging unless you are trying to do some sort of movie. The key here is that the shutter needs to be open for more than a few seconds... most webcams not only don't support this with the software out of the box, but many of them aren't capable of doing it at all.
CCD's also get "noisy" over time and need to be cooled if used for long exposures. This can be done with a peltier cooler, water/air/ice/whatever. This also greatly increases the senstivity of the CCD. For a collection of good books about this, see this page and this one about building your own CCD.
Using a telescope to image meteors costs you more than not. A telescope - in this case, you are using it as a telephoto lense - sees a smaller piece of sky and greatly reduces the chance a meteor will pass in front of the detector/film.
Nonetheless, amateur built CCD's can do pretty amazing things - they can go deeper with a with a couple of minutes of exposure time then the 200-inch Hale Telescope could using film in 1970. Here's a good example, look at these images of extremely faint Globular clusters taken with a homemade telescope and CCD camera.
Some of these objects weren't recorded on the Palomar Sky Survey!
Understand, ground based telescopes aren't a replacement for space based telescopes, if not just because of the bandwidth issues ground based scopes face. Nonetheless, ground based professionals and amateurs are recording data that was believed to have been the sole terrority of space based telescopes when HST was designed, built and launched.
NASA's smart by building NGST to primarly work in the IR ranges.
Oh, BTW, Jupiter and the moon are easier to image then Saturn because they are brighter and larger... :-)
If you were to compare the amateur image to ones taken during the age of film - only 15 years ago, it is possible to see just how far things have come.
Ground based astronomy will never replace space based work, if not just because of the bandwidth limitations of ground based work.
Amateurs are doing amazing stuff. Here's an image of Saturn taken with an amateur 13-inch scope and a camcorder. It's compared side-to-side with a similar HST image. You will be surprised.
Dozens of amateurs joined in a program to supply images to the 2001 International Marswatch program during this past Martian observing season. The pros use these images to decide when to spend their valuable HST time to look at Mars. Some of the images (and visual drawings) are incredible.
Wow... in watching the ads for this movie on TV, I've dismissed it as another stupid attempt by Hollywood to make a war movie.
This makes me think they actually did some homework: yes, aircraft carriers are called "the boat" by those who work on them. Spent five years on one of those pig boats. More water then you'd ever want to see. The longest trash lines you'd ever want to see also.
"Kick ass and press on" - Capt Leighen Smith, USS America, 1984, Indian Ocean cruise
Works even better if you run Linux and can get IRAS running and have a good display, especially if you want to fool around with the Hubble archives. Professional astronomers have been doing their research on unixes for 20 plus years. Tools are available for the asking and most professionals and grad students are willing to help out an amateur who is serious. Linux brings, to an amateur, the same desktop power, but at a very low cost.
Astronomy is one of the few hard sciences where an amateur can contribute serious work, either with nothing more than a telescope and a webcam to digging into the very numerous digital archives that are available for free.
And to add to that, there is a long, long, tradition of amateurs and professional astronomers working together. For a great example see theAmerican Assoc. of Variable Star Observers.
Long and bright, short and bright, dim and short, exploding flashers, point source flashers, long ones that changed brightness as they skipped along, it was quite the show. Beat the 1998 show by quite a bit, if not because it lasted for four+ hours instead of the 45 minute tease we got in '98. Still not 100,000 per hour, though [:-)]
Before the main part of the show started, showed about 50 people M-42 and Saturn through my 20-inch dobsonian, many of which had never looked through a telescope before. Had spent the hours between 10pm and 2am chasing down some faint galaxies.
The overlook was gridlocked with cars by 4:30. By 5:30, cars were parked on both sides of Skyline drive and perhaps 500 people were at the overlook. Even as twilight overtook the sky, you could see bright meteors flashing across the western sky. Many stayed to watch sunrise over solid clouds as far as the eye could see.