Comet 249P

A view of comet 249P as seen in STEREO HI1A imager. Showing a small tail to the left as it passes close to perihelion, the sun is to the lower right and north is up.

Fun With Geminids 2010

Here is some fun that you can do, while the clouds are covering the sky or as where I am from the sun is up, with the Geminid Meteor shower that is starting up about now.

You will need two pieces of software,

Spectrum 15 - spectrum lab to view a audio spectrogram of a wave file we will capture.

Soundtap - audio streaming recorder software to capture the audio stream into a wave file.

Now when you have the software loaded and installed, i am not going to tell you were to get it though..

Now go too Spaceweather.com and find the Spaceweather radio page that has a button to the Radio Meteor audio stream. Click on this and chose the option to hear the audio stream. As the Geminds are active you should hear an occasional pop or whistle sound. They are the Meteors entering the atmoshpere.

Start the soundtap software, you will see a start record button. Yes , you can hit record any time and hit it again to stop. I recorded about a minute at a time, a 10Mb wav file, if you here meteor going past stop the recording.

Now open the spectrum lab software, under the file menu is an option 'audioplay list', select that.

The little folder symbol on th left is how you can locate your saved wav file. Try looking in C:\program data\NCH Swift Sound\soundtap\recordings\ for the last saved wav file.

Hit the play button on the SL playlist window and you should see the spectra gram start to display, look for the different types of meteor sounds. See the image above. You can run the spectrum lab later and set it up to play the recorded wav file and play the sound to the speakers.

check out some of the configuration options that are available.

Have fun the meteor count is rising, how many can you capture. Let me know if you record a big one. Here is what they sound like.

Astroblog: Wait! Mercury Has a Tail (and an astreoid occultation)#links

Fellow blogger Ian has a nice explanation of the how we can see Mercury's Sodium Tail using the STEREO A and B space craft . It's all to do with the angles and timing. Read on here....
Astroblog: Wait! Mercury Has a Tail (and an astreoid occultation)#links

Comet Catalina C/2009 O2

This comet is now passing rapidly through STEREO HI1A FOV. This is a small movie of this faint comet traveling upper right to lower left. Approx Mag is 14 +/- 1 as the imager sees more to the Red end of the spectrum.

Music of the Spheres

Follow this lnk . . .
http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/

GRAS - Deep Space objects

Here are a few efforts at imaging deep space objects using various Global-rent-a-scope(http://www.global-rent-a-scope.com/) telescopes. I am sure you can recognise most of them, lots o' fun. not as hard as it looks.

Comet 81P Wild via GRAS

This is Comet 81P Wild currently in fine shape. The image is crop of a composite of 5x120sec exposures which have been log scaled to show some of the tail details then set to a green false color.