Sunday, December 12, 2010

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.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

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

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

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.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

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.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Bright STEREO comet




The Kreutz comet stream got active again with a few more bright comets passing through. I was able to detect one early enough for it to be classified as a STEREO comet. The others will be SOHO comets. Here is the last moments as seen in the very narrow view for the STEREO COR1A imager. better images may follow later.

Image data courtesy of STEREO/SECCHI/NASA.






This is the comet approaching the sun as seen in STEREO COR2B imager.




Something made it past the sun? As seen in COR2A imager. A dust plume is visible on the far side. This a very interesting comet.




Wednesday, February 10, 2010

More STEREO comets

The stream of sungrazing comets has been very active across January. This has allowed the STEREO comet hunters to catch a few of the crumbs that would usually be detected by the SOHO comet hunting guys. Actually there the same guys...

Of note are two very bright comets caught in STEREO images four days before they appeared in SOHO images. The comet of Jan 02 being getting a lot of attention on the internet.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100116.html

Here is a provisional list from the STEREO hunter posting in Yahoo group, clearly I have spent too much time on this, I have two shared discoveries and ten others counted to me. The provisional count is now 36 STEREO detected comets. Oh! and SOHO has now reached 1800 detected comets.

STEREO Date/Time of Post Discoverer Tel Group Images of..
===========================================================
0022 Dec22,09 12:32:38UT A.Watson HI-1b Kreutz Dec19,2009
0023 Jan2,10 03:47UT 1132 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Dec30,2009-Jan02,2010
0024 Jan2,10 04:08UT 1133 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Dec30,2009
0025 Jan2,10 04:08UT 1133 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Dec29-30,2009
0026 Jan2,10 04:49UT 1135 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Dec30-31,2009
0027 Jan10,10 10:11UT 1197 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan10,2010
0028 Jan15,10 08:36UT 1204 J.Ruan HI-1A Kreutz Jan11-12,2010
0029 Jan15,10 08:40/08:46 1205/6 Ruan,Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan12,2010
0030 Jan15,10 08:40/08:46 1205/6 Ruan,Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan12,2010
0031 Jan1510 09:53UT 1214 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan13,2010
0032 Jan1510 10:03UT 1215 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan13-14,2010
0033 Jan1610 09:33UT 1217 J.Ruan HI-1A Kreutz Jan14,2010
0034 Jan1910 10:08UT 1231 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan17- Jan20,2010
0035 Jan2610 12:09UT 1243 Z.Xu HI-1A Kreutz Jan20-Jan21,2010
0036 Jan2510 06:01UT 1239 A.Watson HI-1A Kreutz Jan21,2010

Thursday, January 21, 2010


Hello world of Bloggers, moving to here because its more portable to the big wide net....

Here is a comet I found around new years....found another the other day.. more to follow.