Fourteenth Meeting
Speakers’ Night
Speakers:
Randy Attwood
Stephen
Barnes - Guest
Speaker
Randy
Attwood showed a news briefing recorded from NASA TV regarding the
status of
the Mars rovers, and specifically the Spirit Rover. Spirit landed on
Mars on
Jan. 3 and was functioning successfully until Wed. Jan. 21 when
meaningful
communication ceased. The news conference of 5 engineers, managers and
scientists detailed the problem with Spirit and spoke about the landing
itself,
and the imminent arrival of the Opportunity Rover in the next day and a
half.
Spirit
went into a processor reset mode similar to a repetitive computer
reboot. An
anomaly team has been set up to study the problem and to find a way to
restore
functionality to the spacecraft. Project Manager Peter Theisinger
indicated
that days or weeks could pass before Spirit would be functional again
and that
full function would likely not be achieved. It was not known but was
suspected
that this could be a hardware rather than a software problem.
Meanwhile,
the flight engineers presented interesting data showing that 2 gusts of
wind
(at 40,000 feet and at 1000 feet) hit the rover on its descent. Spirit
was able
to correct for the horizontal wind with lateral rocket firings. The
atmosphere
was not as thick as expected partly due to a dust storm. This has
prompted the
team to program
Webcam
Astronomy and Photographing Mars from
Stephen
Barnes, President of the Hamilton Centre of the R.A.S.C. gave a
presentation as
part of a Speaker exchange program with the M.A.S.
Stephen has been interested in astronomy
since the age of 8 when he received a 3” telescope. He now owns a
telescope
shop Sky Optics in
The advantages of
webcam
images include the taking of many frames at least some of which are
good, the
ability for stacking, the ability to approach the diffraction limit of
the
telescope, and the low cost (as low as $100 for some webcams).
Disadvantages
include the small imaging area, limitation to short exposures and thus
to
bright targets, and the large file sizes obtained.
A big advantage is
the
availability of free software from the internet.
K3CCD TOOLS can be used to
acquire video images, control the camera and do timelapse imaging. Registax can align and stack frames. Stephen
recommended the use of a barlow or powermate for increasing
magnification
especially for planets. Good seeing at high altitude for the object is
important when imaging. An IR passing filter helps to improve seeing
and can be
used for the red channel when making images. Jupiter especially suffers
from
atmospheric dispersion when it is low in the sky. A planetary
atmospheric
dispersion corrector is of considerable value in this situation.
Stephen showed
examples of
his lunar images with craters as small as 1 to 2 km resolved. In
Copernicus
Crater, the resolution approached an incredible 400 meters. Sun images
with H
alpha filter, Jupiter with 700 stacked frames and Saturn were shown.
Finally Stephen
showed his
Mars shots taken from the
Submitted by Chris Malicki,
Secretary
Chris
Malicki, Secretary
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Mississauga
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