Sfair’s blog

Do you like astronomy? Do you have a not-so-small telescope available? Do you want to be a hero?

You can help astronomers to find a giant storm in Saturn’s atmosphere. Cassini spacecraft detected an anomalous strong radio emission coming from the planet and scientists want to locate the source responsible for this emission.

Carolyn Porco, manager of Cassini Image Science Subsystem (Cassisi ISS), has just sent an e-mail to Ciclops Alliance members inviting amateur astronomers to help in this hunt:

Now, here is another fun homework assignment for those amateur (or professional!) astronomers among you with reasonably good telescopes at your disposal.

Yesterday, the instrument on Cassini that can detect radio signals from the planet once again picked up strong emissions. First in 2004 (http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=870) and again in 2006 (http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1865), we Cassini folks noticed that the radio emissions were correlated with giant thunderclouds seen in the southern hemisphere in what we called `story alley’: a latitudinal band centered around 35 degrees south latitude. This tipped us off that the emissions might in fact be due to lightning arising in giant Saturnian storms.

With new emissions coming from the planet, we want to find the thunderstorm responsible for them. The trouble is: our cameras will not monitor Saturn’s entire atmosphere on a daily basis during the next 10 days. So, we have little chance of actually finding this storm in our images.

That’s where you amateur astronomers come in! We’d like you to help us find the thundercloud that the radio emissions are coming from. And what we need for thundercloud identification are images of Saturn at the best possible spatial resolution and monitoring all longitudes every couple of hours. The most important region to cover is the hemisphere of 300 Western longitude (in the longitude system defined by the International Astronomical Union, IAU). [Tonight 300° will be in the center of Saturn around 04:30 Universal Time. At that time, Saturn is relatively high in the sky (about 47° for an observer at the latitude of Paris). Of course each astronomer has to convert this UT to his/her local time.] Saturn’s rotation period is about 10 hours, 40 minutes.

And we could use images taken in any and all wavelengths - broadband covering all visible sectrum and, if possible RGB, and the methane absorption bands.

Feel free to discuss this on the CICLOPS site, if you like. I suggest using the Dragon storm image (http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=870) as the comment page.

And if you do manage to see anything on Saturn, please email me immediately!

You will become an instant hero, and we’ll issue a press announcement about this project and your participation.

Happy Storm Chasing!
Carolyn

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.