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News briefs
Meteor news: An item at Computer World Australia yesterday about using the FreeBSD operating system for radar research brought to A/CC's attention Genesis Software, Modular Antenna Radar Designs Of Canada (MARDOC), and their All-Sky Interferometric Meteor Radar (SKiYMET) that is used around the world to study meteors, space debris, and atmospheric phsysics. Users include the Atmospheric Dynamics Group at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), and the University of Rostock Institute for Atmospheric Physics Radar Soundings division (see its SKiYMET page for current results from Norway, which are explained here).
The UWO Meteor Physics Group has a new Web site that now has a page on its Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) in Tavistock, Ontario “where we record ~2500 meteoroid orbits per day.” The site also tells about the group's new infrasonic array being deployed to study bolide explosions, and has the beginnings of a fireball video archive.
UWO is a key sponsor of the 16-20 August Meteoroids 2004 conference in London, Ontario. Meteor radar will be on the program, along with all-sky camera networks, infrasound detection, interstellar meteoroids and dust, and meteoroid relationships with comets and asteroids.
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The UWO Meteor Physics Group now also has a page about its all-sky network, part of the larger Sandia National Labs network, and shows a 25 February 2004 fireball caught by two of its four cameras.
Sandia National Labs' own all-sky camera in Albuquerque, New Mexico caught a bright meteor this morning at 4:32am MDT (JPEG, 449Kb movie).
Naming: The Associated Press has a wire story that appears at azcentral.com today about the naming of a second asteroid for dendrochronology pioneer and astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass, who in 1894 picked the site where Lowell Observatory now stands and two decades later founded Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. The first naming was 2196 Ellicott “20 years ago,” and the new one is 15420 Aedouglass (1998 HQ31), which “was discovered by astronomer Tom Gehrels using a 36-inch telescope Douglass commissioned more than 80 years ago as Steward Observatory's first telescope.” That's the Spacewatch 0.9m telescope, which was refurbished last year. This new naming was in the July 14th namings batch.
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