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Aristarchus, leader of LTP.

LUNAR TRANSIENT PHENOMENA

Mrs Winifred Cameron, former lunar expert at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, was the world expert in LTP.

According to her experience and scientific analysis, the Moon is not completely dead and continue to show some surface activities.

These exceptional events are gaz ejection from the surface able to lighten some specific lunar formations. LTP happen sometimes just on the terminator, after the sun rise on the lunar relief and are in interaction with the solar activity. Others events occur when the Moon dives in the magnetic tail of the Earth, etc.

All these sources of LTP are well-known and continue to be monitored mainly by amateurs from ALPO Lunar section. The Moon is far to be dead and that please me as this is one more reason to observe her face with accuracy in all possible lights including monochromatics, using both visual and spectroscopic methods.


FRENCH PAGES

NASA-GSFC

NASA-NSSDC

ALPO Lunar section

Transit of Cygnus X and Cygnus A, BAS

RADIOASTRONOMY

The main activities accessible to amateur radio astronomers are the following :

- Indirect method studies of solar phenomena, meteor infall, and Jupiter noise storms. This type work is usually done at the low radio frequencies, with relatively narrow band receivers. It does not involve sharp imaging of the radio noise source.

This work is conducted mainly with communications-type receivers, requiring only a minimal need for auxiliary equipment.

The expansion equipment usually takes the form of a strip chart recorder or an A/D (Analog to Digital) computer as a readout instrument, and a suitable DC (Direct Current) amplifier required to drive the readout (in some cases). This work, of course, does require a quiet radio band in the spectrum of interest.

- Imaging radio astronomy. This work makes up the bulk of amateur radio astronomy efforts. It is, by its very nature, best practiced in the VHF, UHF, and EHF radio spectra with receiving equipment of relatively broadband design.

The reason for the broadband receivers is that all discrete radio objects radiate over a very broad spectrum, and the bandwidth of the receiver equates to the energy received from the object.

You are interested in ? Please read my pages written in collaboration with Jeffrey Lichtman from SARA.


ENGLISH PAGES

Big Ear Radio Observatory

CNRS-Nancay

Radio Astronomy Supplies

BAS

RadioSky

SARA

BOINC version of SETI@home

SETI@home interface in 2003

GRID APPS - DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS VIA BOINC

With the widespread of Internet, fast home computers, and high-bit-rate lines, "distributed computing" also named "grid applications" allow to researchers to benefit of the calculation power of a supercomputer at low cost thanks to the collaboration of thousands and millions of home computers connected to Internet and the idle cycles of their processors.

Even if at first sight these projects have no direct relation with our day-to-day life - they are scientific projects, sometimes theoretical like simulations, sometimes applied science -, their resultats are part of our need to know, these "Big data", and other knowledge bases to which we all refer one or another day, not only to learn but also to go further, "standing on the shoulders of giants".

What you need to participate in these scientific projects is a computer with an Internet connection, to download BOINC Manager for managing grid applications, and to subscribe to one or more projects depending on the power of your computer. These projects are put at your disposal free of charge.

Let's take only two examples of grid applications : 

- Einstein@Home

- SETI@home (suspended since March 31, 2020)

among more than 130 existing projects related to mathematics, simulations, astronomy, astronautics, physics, seismology, genetics, meteorology, environment, neurosciences, computing, etc.

Einstein@Home has been developed by astronomers with the objective to discover pulsars and gravitational waves. It is linked to radiotelescopes and several LIGO detectors.

Starting in 2005, the Year of Physics, like most of grid applications it is available for most operating systems.

Thanks to Einstein@Home several web users have already allowed astronomers to discover pulsars including gamma pulsars that researchers are now studying in depth.

Amateurs can access to scientific papers via the project website.

*

Altough suspended since March 31, 2020, SETI@home is one of the oldest grid application, starting in 1999.

A short community of 200 professional astronomers are involved in long-term programs searching evidences of extraterrestrial signal or intelligence in the universe, known under the acronym of SETI as it was quickly confirmed a direct contact was impossible to establish or very uncertain (CETI).

What arguments justify this fundamental research ?

- Bioastronomers believe the life has appeared in the cosmos wherein the optimist remind us there must be an infinity of life forms,

- What happened in the Earth coffin may happen elsewhere, even if life has evolved to species much different from what we know,

- At last we have to assume that human intelligence is not the top of the evolution.

Conclusion say bioastronomers, they must be more advanced civilizations than ours in the universe able to transmit voluntary of not electromagnetic waves we could detect.

Starting with these assumptions scientists conducted over fifty SETI projects. With high and low according political hazards, since 1960 they never had cancellation of these researches.

Until 2020, each of us were also in position to help SETI.

If you owned a computer you could even process yourself raw data from SETI@home project (supported by BOINC since 2006) and send back your results to Berkeley University and SETI community. Over 600000 users were actively involved in this quest. 

According to experts, a next day SETI will reborn.

Back to Reports & Reviews

SETI FRENCH PAGES

BOINC

Einstein@Home

SETI@home

Serendip - Berkeley

Beta - Harvard

Jodrell Bank SETI

Optical SETI

SETI Institute

Project Phoenix

The Planetary Society

SETI League

Drake Equation Calculator

SEDS's SETI Page


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