The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – meteor news & FITS files
  panel 2 – bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring

Cover: This is an A/CC composite of three fireballs caught recently by Jim Gamble's infrared all-sky camera (fisheye lens) in El Paso, Texas, as noted in A/CC news yesterday (“All-sky news”) and Tuesday (“Meteor news”). Inset is a composite view of the same early July 5th fireball as seen from the Sandia Labs visual-light all-sky camera (dome mirror) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 220 miles (355 km.) north of El Paso. In these images, north is up and east is left, as if laying on the ground, looking up at the sky with your feet pointed to the south. False coloring is added to the grayscale video by the all-sky camera software to help bring out detail.

Meteor news:  The Cloudbait Observatory July 7th bright meteor report has been updated and illustrated to tell that multiple all-sky cameras actually caught two meteors east of Denver, Colorado that night just two minutes apart and traveling close ground tracks but in opposite directions.

U.S. fireballs 7-8 July

A New Zealand Herald article today, “Valuable meteorite stays put in NZ,” tells that the June 12th house basher (news thread) “has been officially named the Auckland Meteorite” because the neighborhood (Ellerslie) and street (Tecoma) names were already taken for meteorites in other countries.

more news >>

FITS files:  The HST European Homepage has a news release from yesterday about its new free FITS Liberator plug-in for Photoshop CS for Windows and Mac OS-X, and which also has limited functionality for Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements 2.

FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is a 23-year-old file format in use today for handling almost all professional and amateur telescope images, and is a common format for astronomical archives, but is not widely supported by consumer image editing software. The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) FITS Support Office, which is the format's main support site, lists links to some FITS software used by astronomers, such as fv, FTools, and FITS Tools. Another FITS support site is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) FITS archive.

An alternative for Windows users, especially those with Photoshop versions 3.x to 7, is the shareware FitsPlug from Tin Shed Observatory. Tin Shed also has the free Fits4Win utility for viewing FITS files in Windows. Two other viewers are NRAO's FITSview for Win/Mac/Unix and ESO's Java-based JIPA.

<< continued from panel 1

Bits & pieces:  A widely published AP wire story, such as at the Flagstaff Arizona Daily Sun today, reports that weather is both helping (light rain yesterday) and threatening (potential lightning and high winds) the wildfire situation on Mt. Graham in southeastern Arizona. The main Web site for Mt. Graham International Observatory (MGIO) is off-line today, but its old site is available.

KVOA-TV Tucson has a report from Wednesday about “Fire preparations for telescopes” at Kitt Peak National Observatory in southern Arizona (KPNO), which is where Spacewatch is located.

Risk monitoring 9 July

At last check, there is no news to report today in risk monitoring.