Re: Video talk

Bart De Pontieu (BDP@MPEPL)
Mon, 26 Aug 1996 20:38:03 +0100 (CET) 

Long time ago, Lew Gramer wrote:

>"R.B. Minton"  <rbminton@sembilan.UCHSC.edu> writes:
>>I have been in contact with meteor people and they have not mentioned any
>>automatic reduction methods.
>
>For an example of some of this ongoing work, see the URL:
>	http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~smo/meteore/imc94.html
>
>For some other possible references to follow up, check out:
>	http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~smo/imo/video/video.html
>
>There seem to be *potential* options for automating most of the stages of 
>video meteor analysis. Many of these will likely also be applicable to satobs.

Interesting suggestion, Lew. It seems to me that the meteor observations have
one major advantage though, that is that they use a stationary mount. 
Hand-guided video observations are hard to process automatically. It seems the
local setup that we have at work here (which is normally used for northern
lights observations) will not be very useful for routine, bulk video
observations for the DRA project, as the amount of data will be too large.
This is the case because hand-guiding means the satellite could be anywhere
in the image, as the image jumps from frame to frame.

What is needed is tracking software and a telescope that is steered by this
software. Software of the sort that people like Alphonse Pouplier, Ron 
Dantowitz & Marek Kozubal, Alain Grycan & Eric Laffont have written. 
For this kind of work one does not need a large telescope, a 4.5" Newtonian
will do fine for light-curves. This photometric data can be used to determine
rotation axis directions as a function of time in a much more reliable and
accurate way than the DRA-observations. If automated sufficiently, such a
set-up would be a great resource. I intend to try and build something along
those lines. I have the impression Dantowitz&Kozubal's software only works
with LX-200 telescopes (which would be overkill for this stuff), but maybe
I'm wrong. Maybe some comments from the authors?

I would hope to encourage other people to try something along these lines as
well, since I think the DRA-project is valuable. At the COSPAR conference
last month, I gave a talk about possible observations of collisions with
space debris, as deduced from flash period measurements. That this is not at
all *that* unlikely is proven by the recent collision the French satellite
suffered from. It was also suggested to me by space debris researchers from
Johnson Space Center that the probability of such a collision occurring is
not too low. In any case, the temporal evolution of the rotation axis of a
tumbling satellite can tell a lot about what happens to the satellite
physically, and would thus be instrumental to check for such collisions. 
There is a keen interest from the professional side in this work (I had offers
from the owners of both a Swiss and a Russian 1m telescope for collaboration),
which makes this project worthwhile. I will come back to this in a future
message. Space debris research gets a lot of attention, and it would be great
if we, as amateurs, could contribute to it.

Cheers,
     Bart
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Bart De Pontieu --  Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial Physics, Garching
bdp@mpe-garching.mpg.de  --      http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bdp/satintro.html
Join us at Eurosom 2, Oct 19/20 1996 -- http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bdp/eurosom.html
BWGS-coordinator -- Flash editor -- SeeSat-L administrator -- would-be-observer
   "Life is like a jigsaw. You get the straight bits, but there's something"
       "missing in the middle." -- XTC, "All Of A Sudden (It's Too Late)"
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