[meteorite-list] SOHO Spots Its 1000th Comet

From: Martin Altmann <Altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Aug 18 16:13:56 2005
Message-ID: <004e01c5a432$b1660360$1a629a54_at_9y6y40j>

>.... 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" <baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
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
Received on Thu 18 Aug 2005 04:23:26 PM PDT