Mike's Astro Photos

Who says aliens and UFOs don’t exist?

Mike with Alien & UFO

In an effort to make minor improvements to the trajectory and search locations I have been spending a lot of time gathering more information about the original videos. I had contacted Alison Kruse and asked her if she could send me a copy of the original video as the only one that was every analyzed was the youtube version. Rob Matson was able to identify 3 stars plus Jupiter from the youtube version and the hope was we would be able to identify more stars in the HD/RAW version. Alison went to a lot of work to get me the video and I really appreciate it. In addition to meteors Alison has been filming some interesting phenomena in the skies east of Pittsburgh. Check out Alison’s UFO videos on her youtube channel SeeingUFOsPA. I recommend watching her UFO shooting laser beam movie.

After reviewing the high res version I was able to identify 2 new stars upping the total to 6. I talked to Rob and he said he thought he would be able to make some refinements with the new information. So thanks very much Alison the HD version of the video will definitely help narrow our search area.

Here is a single frame from the higher res version:

High Res Frame of Pittsburgh Meteor Video

Essentially I broke out approximately 20 frames from the video. I then layered them in photoshop and stepped through each frame one at a time. On a separate layer I marked anything that looked like it could be a star. I then mapped the image to a star chart. While most of the dots I had tagged were hot pixels or distortion I was able to see two extra ones that were not visible in the youtube version.

Mapped Pittsburgh Frame

I took the angle readings from the star chart myself and they are probably lacking accuracy for various reasons, however ‘the professionals’ will be creating an astrometric plate that will provide improved precision for these angles.

I’m waiting for this new version of the video to be analyzed, but my hope is it will make a slight improvement to the meteor path and ultimately the search locations.

Below is a map of Alison’s angles along with the York Water video angles. Its important to note that I measured these angles myself and they could be subject to a margin of error.

The color code for the lines in the map below are as follows: blue = entry point, green = first meteor position; yellow = last meteor position; red = meteor horizon point.

Here is a pretty cool space video a friend sent me:

We Are All Connected – Watch more Funny Videos

Fake Meteor Crater In Latvia

A report about a 20 meter meteor crater and burning meteorite came out Sunday night. Minutes after the report surfaced meteorite experts called foul.

Today scientists have reported that the crater was man made and concluded this was not caused by a meteor and must be some sort of hoax.

Possible non meteor explanations include:

1) Publicity stunt to increase tourism perpetrated by Borat and the Latvian Government
2) Russian weapons test gone bad
3) Underground natural gas explosion
4) Latest experiment from balloon boy’s dad

At this point most news organizations outside are reporting this as a hoax. The people who created / reported the incident made a pretty cool video though.

In an effort refine or confirm the current meteor trajectory I have been doing a lot of work to improve the altitude and azimuth readings from the collected videos. A couple of meteor experts suggested taking calibrated stellar photos of the direct video sightings. A calibrated stellar photo is a picture or video that contains visible stars or celestial objects taken with the same camera in the same location. The frames from the meteor video can then be layered over the calibrated photo and precise azimuth and altitude readings can be determined. Using known reference points in the calibrated photo you can get reference points to the unknown object in the original photo.

I contacted the York Water Company and asked if we could shoot some video from the fish eye camera that recorded the meteor on July 6th. Based on the distortion and power of the camera I thought grabbing stars was going to be hard. A friend of mine was checking the star charts and let me know that the full moon would be rising in the east on October 4th and October 5th. York’s camera faces east and I agreed this would be our best chance for calibrating the photo. By recording the moon rising on two different nights we would be able to obtain dozens of reference points throughout the night. The videos turned out perfectly and I have been able to do exactly what I wanted.

There are a total of nine frames from the original meteor video. I was able to layer these frames over the moon pictures and in three cases I got perfect matches. The meteor is exactly in the same position as the moon at different points of time. The rest of the frames partially overlay or come very close to moon pictures. I have been able to get a much more precise reading of the altitude and azimuth from the York video using this new calibrated photo. When I trace the meteor path to the horizon in the star maps I come up with a 67 degree angle. If I draw a line NE at 67 degrees in Google Earth from the York Water pumping station it intersects with Rob Matson’s 0km impact point almost perfectly (Rob’s point is actually 67.5 degrees NE from York Water). It is my understanding Rob did not use the York Water video in his original 3D model projection because we could not get a precise enough ALT-AZ reading from the camera due to the distortion caused by the fisheye lens. I interpret the analysis from this calibrated video as a confirmation of what Rob has already predicted. I find it pretty amazing how close this new angle comes to Rob’s original projection considering Rob only used the Pittsburgh video and my astro photo as input for his calculations.

York Water Trajectory Map

We finished the construction on the observatory about 6 weeks ago. I have been waiting for the pier for the last month. I was late getting the pier order into pier tech, I did not realize the had to fabricate it / build to order. I got shipping confirmation on Monday so the pier should be here any day now. Once that is installed I’ll be at 100% and ready to start taking nice astro photos again. I haven’t been able to photograph without the pier as there is too much vibration with the tripod on the wooden floor. Almost there, I can’t wait!

Observatory

The Mars Rover has found another big meteorite on Mars. Interesting article with some great pictures:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0910/11meteorite/

I have to do a lot of shadow analysis with all of these new videos so I went googling and found this program written by someone at MIT.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/g8rghr/297509

It has been pretty useful conceputally interpreting the shadows. We will need percise measurements of the shadows in order to get anything tangible out of the shadow videos.

NASA is set to crash a rocket into the moon at 7:30 AM EST tomorrow morning.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/08/probe.moon.crash/index.html

hmm… this could be interesting.

here’s NASA’s official site for this event:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/index.html

This video shows a shadow that is cast from a flag pole caught in the light of the Mason Dixon Meteor on July 6th 2009. This is certainly the best shadow video we have acquired yet. The tall flag pole casts a long shadow and mutliple frames of movement were captured. If you would like to know more information about this video or watch the high res version please email me at mike.hankey [at] gmail.com.