Hi,

a colleague of mine has - on his private initiative - set up this website as part of an IYA project:

http://www.uapreporting.org/

The idea is to collect information on weird stuff in the sky… Have a look!

dvk

Has anybody written about Cosmic Vision? That’s the new ESA programme for science missions with launches around 2017-2019. I am the Study Scientist for Marco Polo, an asteroid sample return mission. We have a so-called Science Study Team with 10 scientists from all over Europe, plus colleagues from the US and Japan.

Right now my task is to put together the so-called Yellow Book - or the ‘Assessment Study Report’. It describes the results of a >1 year study of industry (well the industrial input is actually put together by the Study Manager, David Agnolon) and the iterations we had on the science.

The intial science didn’t really change. So now we have a document with about 120 pages describing how the mission could be done.The final version has to be done by 29 Sep 2009. I keep getting inputs from the SST, many editorials but also comments relevant to the content… At some point this document will be publicly available, I think after the ‘public presentation’ in Paris scheduled for 01 Dec 2009. For now, check out our web page at http://sci.esa.int/marcopolo.

dvk

My last ‘meteors’ blog said that it cleared up. Indeed we had some clear skies after midnight last night and switched on our cameras. The image-intensified camera saw almost 400 meteors, more than half were Perseids. We still have to analyze the data from our SPOSH camera, it does not have an automatic detection. We performed test measurements of the Moon with the SPOSH-IR camera and also pointed it to the sky for a few hours in the hope of recording a bright meteor.

Our colleagues at Gahberg also had mixed weather, sometimes clouds, sometimes good. Let’s hope that we managed to record some meteors simultaneously, so that we can compute their orbits!

Right now it’s raining and the weather forecast for the next night is bad, but I think with what we got the last two nights we can be reasonably happy.

dvk

It’s clear! We set up our cameras and started recording. Already we have 5 meteor detections in 4 minutes observing time. good!

Another evening where we try to point our cameras to the sky recording meteors… But it’s raining. So what did we do today? After the last reasonably successful night we went to bed at 6 in the morning and slept to 12. Breakfast, then we went to the observatory to ask the observatory staff for help fixing some cables. In the afternoon we went South to search for meteorites - in April this year a bright fireball illuminated the area here and it was predicted that some meteorites should have made it to the ground. So we looked for two hours - but didn’t find anything. Not unexpectedly, the area is difficult to search - steep slopes, forest - only some areas are grass. We found ourselves some freshly mowed meadows and scanned them, but nothing. It was fun anyway!

On the way back we stopped at a small simple restaurant and found out that the owner organised a barbeque because it’s the night of the meteors! He expected about 20 guests from the area, will serve them beer and meat and then let them look at the sky. Not sure how this will work, my experience is that after two beer I wouldn’t see anything at the sky anymore…

Now we’re back at the observatory and wait until the rain stops and the clouds go away. dvk

The photo shows our SPOSH camera on top of the observatory building (the little black box on the tripod).

dvk

A small team from ESA with support from a friend from the International Meteor Organisation are  observing the Perseid meteor shower from the Kanzelhoehe Observatory in Austria. Attached the first Perseid recorded with our ‘Large Intensifier Camera’ LIC1, recorded at 20h32m41s UTC The camera has been running now for not even half an hour and already recorded about 15 meteors, including 8 Perseids. Attached the first one.

We have clear skies and record with LIC1 and a SPOSH camera. We are also operating the SPOSH-IR camera, which is sensitive from 800 nm to 2500 nm wavelength, i.e. the near infrared - but with that one it’s difficult to tell whether it sees stars, this will need some image processing.

dvk

Unfortunately this night is again cloudy, we just had some rain coming through. So rather than operating our meteor cameras, I can write this blog.

Alas, we arrived at our observatory as planned. After two days of relaxed traveling and some family visits Andre Knoefel and me arrived at Kanzelhohe Observatory yesterday afternoon. I had to stop once up the hill to avoid the cooling water of my car’s engine to overheat.

We set up our SPOSH camera on the top of the building and tested it. It didn’t work the first time (as expected) - but it only was a loose connector. Uff.

Unfortunately it started raining in the evening. So we went back to our appartment (5 minutes walking distance from the observatory), relaxed a bit and went to sleep.

Today it’s again raining. We are preparing our other equipment, and realize we’d need some USB repeaters. It’s Sunday… So we’ll have to get them tomorrow.

So much for now! Detlef.

Andre in front of the observatory

Today we had the handover of a near-infrared camera built by Jena-Optronik for us, which is to demonstrate that one can build such a camera in flight quality to e.g. observe meteors in the infrared from space. Where the contract only covered a design on paper for the flight model. We did get a so-called breadboard, which can be used in the laboratory and hopefully also outside. After understanding how the camera works, we packed it nicely. I will drive South tomorrow to eventually set it up in Austria at the Kanzelhohe Observatory to perform tests, together with Hakan Svedhem who was the initiator of this study.

I also packed a camera for observing meteors in the visible - I mentioned this before, the so-called SPOSH camera. And an intensified camera.

I’ll go to Munich tomorrow, taking my family. I’ll drop them off at my wife’s mother, then pick up a friend and amateur meteor observer from the Berlin area, Andre Knoefel, at the Munich airport. We’ll arrive at the observatory on Saturday and set up - more hopefully then.

dvk

One of the most famous meteor showers are the Perseids. They are about the peak on 12 August. Under clear skies, one should see about 40 - 60 meteors per hour.