More NEAIC

Don Parker gave a fascinating and humorous talk on planetary imaging which has got me ready to head back out with my ToUCam to try some more imaging. I’ll have to work through some of his formulae to see how I ought to be setting up my camera and, given that I live under a flight path to LaGuardia, I might have to consider replacing the ToUCam with something that supports USB 2.0 so I can take images at a higher frame rate to try to beat both the seeing conditions and the lovely jet wash induced turbulence.

Mike Peoples gave a run down of some of his activities as part of Tim Puckett’s supernova search team. The search team mostly uses SITe CCDs, those pricey back-thinned super sensitive ones because the name of the game is rapid coverage of the entire sky. In the past 96 months (that’s 8 years), they’ve taken over 1,000,000 images and discovered 137 supernovae. That’s about 350 images/night average and, of course, nobody can actually image every night. The network consists of both imagers (in multiple locations) and scanners, folks who "only" review the images blinking against a comparison to locate supernovae. With the pricey CCDs and large (24-inch) scopes, this sounded like a discouraging area to go into for me. But Mike also pointed out the recent supernova in M51 was discovered by an amateur using a Meade DSI on his first night out with the camera. So, there’s hope for me with my ST7.

Next, I’m off to Joe Patterson’s talk about the Center for Backyard Astrophysics.