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To parakato isos endiaferei... Deixnei ti dynatoties mporei na exei o erasitexnis akoma kai stin simerini epoxi pou tileskopia mikrotera apo 4m theorountai "mikra"!

 

Petros

 

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http://skyandtelescope.com/news/current/article_627_1.asp

 

Backyard Search for Asteroids and Extrasolar Planets

By David L. Chandler

Sky & Telescope

June 7, 2002

 

An ingenious arrangement of three homebuilt 14-inch

telescopes on fixed mountings is enabling Tucson-based amateur astronomer

Roy Tucker to conduct a backyard hunt for asteroids whose quality is on par

with the best professional searches in the world.

 

Tucker, an instrumentation engineer at the National Optical Astronomy

Observatory (NOAO), completed his new telescope setup last April. The fixed

mountings made the whole construction far less expensive than any telescope

set up on a normal, steerable mount. Tucker's fixed telescopes scan the sky

as the Earth turns and reach a limiting magnitude of 20.5 - fainter than

most professional asteroid searches. And thanks to a cleverly designed

bimetallic (steel and aluminum) framework that automatically compensates for

temperature changes, the telescope can run unattended all night with no need

for focus adjustments. The three telescopes are arranged so that they

produce sequential image triplets that can be compared to reveal any moving

objects.

 

Since his earlier searches began in 1998 (Sky & Telescope: March 1999, page

76), Tucker has detected 4,812 asteroids, several hundred of which were new

discoveries. He presented his latest results in a poster at the Albuquerque

AAS meeting. Now, with the help of a nonprofit organization of amateur and

professional astronomers called GNAT (Global Network of Astronomical

Telescopes), he hopes to expand the system, which initially cost him just

$12,000, into a globe-spanning network of 48 telescopes to provide

24-hour-a-day time coverage. GNAT is seeking involvement by universities,

small colleges, schools, and serious amateurs. Such a network should make it

possible not only to discover many more asteroids, but also to do precise

photometric searches for supernovae, variable stars, and even extrasolar

planet transits, says Tucker.

 

Roger Culver, an astronomer at Colorado State University and one of GNAT's

organizers, says this is "a chance to really bring small telescopes back to

the fore and really do some interesting things."

 

[ 09 Ιουνίου 2002: Το μήνυμα τροποποιήθηκε από: petrosccd ]