[meteorite-list] SOHO Spots Its 1000th Comet

[Martin Altmann]

>.... 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