>.... Scarmato said. "I want > to dedicate the SOHO 1000th comet to my wife Rosy and my son Kevin to....
and > For his accomplishment, Scarmato will receive a SolarMax DVD, a SOHO > T-shirt, solar viewing glasses, and more. How scrooge and grumpy they are, they could have named the comets at least SOHO-Rosy and SOHO-Kevin :-) Buckleboo ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ron Baalke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 5:13 PM Subject: [meteorite-list] SOHO Spots Its 1000th Comet > > http://space.com/scienceastronomy/050817_comet_hunter.html > > All-time Best Comet-Hunter Spots Number 1000 > By Bjorn Carey and Robert Roy Britt > space.com > 17 August, 2005 > > The best comet hunter in history recently spotted its 1,000th comet, > accounting for nearly half the comets ever discovered. > > The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which is run by NASA and > the European Space Agency, was designed to watch the Sun, but has since > proved to have excellent ability at spotting comets. > > The images SOHO took were posted to the internet and amateur > sky-watchers had the opportunity to find and report new comets. Amateurs > were finding comets so quickly that SOHO operators decided to make a > contest of it, awarding a prize to the person who discovered the 1,000th > comet. > > Italian high school teacher Toni Scarmato got lucky on Aug. 5 and > spotted comets numbers 999 and 1,000 in the same SOHO image. > > "I am very happy for this special experience that is possible thanks to > the SOHO satellite and NASA-EVA collaboration," Scarmato said. "I want > to dedicate the SOHO 1000th comet to my wife Rosy and my son Kevin to > compensate for the time that I have taken from them to search for SOHO > comets." > > For his accomplishment, Scarmato will receive a SolarMax DVD, a SOHO > T-shirt, solar viewing glasses, and more. > > A second SOHO comet-spotting contest awarded prizes to Andrew Dolgopolov > of Ireland for the closest guess - within 22 minutes - of when the > 1,000th comet would be spotted. > > The SOHO spacecraft was engineered to watch solar eruptions > and the ensuing space weather that sometimes bombards Earth. > > But early on in the mission, armchair astronomers figured out they could > become comet discoverers using SOHO > images posted to the Web. Because SOHO is trained on the Sun, it only > sees comets that whiz by the Sun, called Sun grazers. > snip ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
