Hi, all,
A fellow amateur astronomer in the Boston area, John Boudreau, has been getting some neat images of Mercury, including some that show longitudes not mapped by Mariner 10. He's put together a few of them into a movie that shows Mercury's rotation and changing phase.
Before you go to check out the link, I'd like to remind you that this was all done using a backyard telescope and an inexpensive webcam - equipment readily affordable to hobbyists, using image stacking techniques that were pioneered by amateur astronomers, and that are now being refined by people like John. And perhaps most remarkably, his imaging was done from sites in the densely-populated suburb of Saugus, Mass. - not exactly an area known for dark skies and good seeing!
http://home.comcast.net/~jeboud/mercury.htm
- John Sheff
Cambridge, MA
Hey, that's really amazing; thanks for posting!
Fantastic, really; backyard amateurs can now achieve better results in planetary observations than the pros could in the 60s & 70s. Your bud is very talented, though, John; takes a lot of time & patience to make a sequence like that for a hard target like Mercury.
Actually, I've never seen a movie like that of Mercury before; since you guys are in Cambridge, strongly suggest contacting Sky & Telescope! .
Like riding along with MESSENGER and looking back at Mercury after the first flyby coming up soon.
Thanks, really whets the appetite for the upcoming show in January.
I think upcoming missions frequently inspire excellent work from the (not so) amatuer community.
I would suggest looking at some of the other planetary images on his site. The Mercury ones are good, but so are his shots of the other planets.
There are still a few challenges left; imaging the largest main-belt asteroids is one that comes to mind. Other than that & comet & asteroid discoveries, though, you're right; UMSF will supplant both professional and amateur Solar System observations.
For worlds like Mercury, it is true that UMSF may soon fully supplant professional and amateur telescopic observers. However, for Venus, Mars, Jupiter/Io, Saturn,Titan, Uranus, and Neptune (and Triton photometry comes in here), monitoring temporal changes is extremely valuable. It will be a long time before we have spacecraft at these planets long enough to pin down all phenomenon that could be detected from earth. Also, with Uranus and Neptune, their long orbits mean that it will be a very, very long time before we have monitored them through all seasons. During the time when an orbiter is there, the need for groundbased data is reduced (although not eliminated without a network of orbiters, and even then it would be needed for a baseline of comparison with historical data). But orbiters only last so long. We may live to see the day that Mars and Venus have constant UMSF attention, but I don't think that will happen to all these planets.
Someday the need for telescopic observations may pass, but for active worlds, we are a long way from that day.
Congratulations to John! He certainly deserves the recognition!
My congrats as well!!! I'm absolutely astonished that these were captured while the Sun was up...
Something interesting about the animated Webcam series of Mercury images is that (from what I can tell) they include the part of the planet that contains the hypothesized "Skinakas Basin" which is supposed to be an impact structure larger than Caloris.
According to a couple of Internet sources I've been looking at (including the Wikipedia entry --- hopefully it's accurate), this basin is supposed to be centred just north of the equator at about 280 degrees west. Assuming that the central meridians given for the webcam shots use the same longitude system, it should be in the "middle" of the planet in the second and third images.
There does seem to be something there, but it's hard to tell what it is. Possibly just wishful thinking, I suppose.
Rob
Amazing work!
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