NASA Meteor Workshop – August 3-4, 2011

Aug.25 2011

NASA Meteor Workshop – August 3-4, 2011

I recently attended a NASA meteor workshop at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Western North Carolina. The workshop consisted of two days of talks put on by the world’s foremost meteor scientists. The talks centered around meteors and video cameras and all sky camera networks and topics relating to the operation and analysis of meteors using different types of cameras and software. There were some VERY cool advanced technologies showcased at this event. I was invited to speak and gave two presentations. The first presentation was about the recent work my company did for the AMS website and the second was an update on the Mason Dixon Meteor hunt. Both presentations were well received and I got a lot of new pointers and ideas that will recharge the meteorite hunt. It was really great to meet the upper echelon of the meteor community and I consider it a privilege being invited to such an exclusive event.

Here is a PDF of the workshop program which contains an agenda and abstracts of each presentation.

Here are the slides from my power point presentation.

For the MDM hunt update I used The Official Page of the Mason Dixon Meteor, as I guide for my presentation.

Here are a few astro photos I took from the PARI site.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd 2011

Nestled inside the Shenandoah Mountains, PARI has very nice dark skies.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd 2011

Allowing for a prominent Milky Way.

NASA Meteor Workshop, PARI NC - August 3rd, 2011

Here’s a picasa photo gallery with a few more pics from the trip.

And a time lapse video of all photos taken over the three days.

3 Comments for this entry

Howard
August 26th, 2011 on 2:56 pm
Excellent Mike… What kind of work did you do for AMS?
Mike Hankey
August 27th, 2011 on 7:51 am
Howard, we rebuilt the fireball reporting application and did a redesign.Check it out http://www.amsmeteors.org
Richard Norman
September 1st, 2011 on 7:16 pm
Based on the power point slides, it seems to me that you earned the right to be at the workshop. Thank you, for modernizing the AMS fireball report system. Could not see much of it without filing a report, but the google stuff sounds cool. Did not see a link from the fireball event in the log to any of the google maps. Is that only available to AMS affiliates? They just had a fireball event Aug 28th in Georgia. Don’t know if dropped any meteorites. Did not see any reports from NASA in the AMS log, but they posted their all sky images with the news media. Cooke and Suggs also announced a fireball on May 18, 2010 that likely dropped meteorites between Gurley and Scottsboro, Alabama. Would love to get more info on the ground track since that is close enough to go hunting on the weekend. I was also glad to see that the AMS was planning on reaching out to the amateurs like me that have a Watec camera sitting around that could be watching the skies.