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Astro: peteschultz
Back in the late 50's and early 60's a school buddy of mine was Pete
Schultz. He and I helped found the Prairie Astronomy Club, http://cs.astronomy.com/asycs/blogs/...astronomy.aspx He went on to be the guy who punched holes in a comet and more recently the moon. You don't want to hear his comments on how NASA screwed up LCross with the last minute change in target to one that wouldn't allow the plume to be seen from earth. This was known before the change but they made it anyway, against his recommendation. There is still an arrest warrant out for him in Russia thanks to an idiot astrologer and even dumber police system that believes her claim that Deep Impact ruined her astrology business by so altering the solar system she could no longer make "accurate" forecasts! You've likely seen him on many Shows firing NASA's high speed vacuum gun making craters and modeling the moon's creation when the earth was hit by a Mars size body. His wife made the earth stand ins for that one. He has been a prof at Brown University for decades and traveled the world researching craters. This June we were both giving talks at the same convention. As usual his was better and far more exciting as he used a gun to create craters that perfectly modeled ejecta trajectories of known impacts. These showed why LCROSS' change of target at the last minute prevented the impact from being seen from earth. He still has the same energy he had 50 years ago. Wish I did. My long grown son's comment was "Neat Dad but your friend was AWESOME!" He was, I have to agree. Anyway, he told me that he has an asteroid named after him so I had to give a go at imaging it for him. Unfortunately, it is dim and well below my -15 degree limit. It didn't help that when it was a bit better placed in July it was so far away it was too dim. Now it is dim because it is down deep in my atmospheric extinction. When I had the best opportunity to image it the weather didn't cooperate. When it finally did it was already in my Meridian Tree so I had to wait for it to exit the tree. That puts it in a very poor location. I was limited as to the time I had due to other trees and it's low altitude putting it down below my observatory walls. You can't go back a second night on a moving target. I only had a 30 minute window so took the asteroid August 16 and one 10 minute round of color the following night. The asteroid was too dim to get through the color filters so that didn't matter. It was barely in the same field of view. I've attached a full image and an annotated image as well as a crop. There were a half dozen asteroids in the frame but three were lost to atmospheric extinction. One spent most of the time behind a star. Peteschultz is in the center of course. I couldn't see it in the 20 second framing image so had to trust the pointing accuracy of the Paramount. You likely will need the annotated image to spot it however. The asteroid was in retrograde motion so moving down and to the right. North is up in this image as it is in most of my images. Naming citation: (16952) Peteschultz = 1998 KX3 Peter H. Schultz, a geologist at Brown University, has studied cratering phenomena experimentally and in the field. He has played a major role in defining and developing the Deep Impact mission, particularly through his cratering experiments at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range. 14" LX200R @ f/10 L=3x10' (14 degrees above horizon on average) RGB 1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Video made at Pete's presentation. It's more spectacular live but you'll get the idea. I wish there was audio to go with it but it was taken with a high speed camera so audio wasn't possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HMnA6EOAg0 I've also attached a photo of Pete (left) and me (right) at the banquet. Middle fellow is Jack Dunn planetarium director for Mueller Planetarium. Rick -- Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct. Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh". |
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