[meteorite-list] Detectability

[Richard Kowalski]

Ed,

checking my observing report from 6 October, 2008, the night of discovery, the conditions were far from perfect and the seeing wasn't that great. I reported it as 2.3 arcseconds full width half max for the night.

The night before was cloudy and I didn't head up to the observatory. The night of impact the seeing was only slightly better, but highly variable and both of these nights were windy. Perfect nights have sub-arcsecond seeing and our fwhm (1 arcsec pixels) is <1.8

With the 1.5-m we can reach 19.0V with good SNR using a 5-second exposure AT Nautical Twilight.

--
Richard Kowalski
http://fullmoonphotography.net
IMCA #1081


--- On Mon, 9/7/09, E.P. Grondine <epgrondine at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Detectability
> To: damoclid at yahoo.com
> Cc: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Monday, September 7, 2009, 2:44 PM
> Hi Richard - 
> 
> Thanks for the information, and congratulations on TC3. 
> 
> I make that 320,000 miles something like 2 hours if it had
> of been on a direct intercept orbit. I am assuming you had
> nearly perfect sky conditions as well at your observatory. 
> 
> I think this one is going to turn into photons in a bucket
> and sky conditions. 
> 
> The items of interest are cometessimals, the smallest
> around 30 meters with 5 kilton impact force by my current
> estimate, with 2 joined cometissimals around 60 meters and
> 15 megatons of impact force. (But I have been wrong before,
> and reserve the right to be wrong in the future.)
> 
> No one in NASA seems to know what happened to the CAPS
> analysis. It is probably sitting on a shelf somewhere with
> the Apollo 11 Moon walk slowscan tapes.
> 
> E.P. Grondine
> Man and Impact in the Americas
> 
> 
>       
>