Three Wise Men

Orionids 2009

Looking up the sky – a week ago my wife announced that she saw a meteor. Since we were both semi-awake at the time and I must say that probably I glimpsed at it with the corner of my eye, nodded and went to sleep. Not much to do about it … or so I thought.

As it happens we saw one of the Orionids. This is another annual meteor shower, similar to Perseids which were described in this article. As other meteor showers they are named after their radiant, which is located near constellation Orion. Usually they last from 15-29 of October with the maximum between 20-22 of October and this year the peak will be seen on the 21 of October. On average the produce from 20-25 meteors per hour. But reports are claiming that this years activity could be similar to last years, which was around 60 meteors per hour. If you were to be looking for it the radiant is about 10 degrees north of Betelgeuse in the southeastern sky.

First observations of the Orionids were made by E.C. Herrick in the 1839-1840. First documented record was which produced accurate forecasts for the next year were made by the A.S. Herschel. It is now known that the Orionids are a by product of the well-known Halley’s Comet.

Happy hunting.

Perseids 2009

“Perseids” parent body is a comet Swift-Tuttle; which was discovered in 1862 by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle.  Comet made a return trip back in 1992. Perseids meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, maybe more.  Earliest records can be seen in eastern journal and annals which date back to 36 AD. But Catholics referred to it as “tears of St. Lawrence”, since meteors seemed to be in abundance during the festival of that saint¹. This particular meteor shower was discovered by Adolphe Quételet, who made his report of meteor shower emanating from the constellation of Perseus in 1835.

Observers on the Northern Hemisphere can start seeing Perseid meteors as early as 23 of July, when one meteor per hour can be visible. During the course of three weeks this rate slowly builds-up. At peak; which is usually around August 12-13 we can spot 50-80 meteors per hour. They rapidly decline to about 10 per hour by the August 15 and can rarely be seen after the 22 of August. They emanate from constellation of Perseus. It is good to wait for the constellation to rise up on the sky and observe topically fast and bright meteors.

If you are on vacation or have time and there is not a cloud in the sky at night take a load of and catch a falling star.

1. August 10 in Italy [↩]

E.T. has been calling home for 10 years, SETI celebrates

Few days ago project SETI@home celebrated its 10th anniversary. I can’t believe that it has been so long. We were recording signals from outer space for a bit longer time, but past ten years some of those signals have been properly analyzed and listened to. Looking for aliens extra terrestrial life, great, lovely and fascinating. I guess. Let’s take a look at what SETI@home accomplished in ten years. But first, we have too get a little more knowledge about how SETI@home works.

Arecibo Observatory is always listening to that part of the sky where it is located and while it’s operating data is being recorded. This data has to be split in smaller units which are then analyzed by SETI@home clients. Telescope records a certain number of workunit groups on each day. Those groups are then split into 256 units by frequency. Each unit is 107 seconds long and units time overlaps for about 20 seconds. Workunit database wasn’t updated for some time now, but on August 2008 there were 1840943 workunit groups recorded and made available to SETI@home clients all over the world.

When client is activated it connects to SETI server, downloads a workunit and starts analyzing it. When analysis is complete it sends results back to SETI server and downloads another package. And so on and so on. Well, Arecibo telescope wasn’t available all the time to SETI group and over the years they’ve been getting less and less data to analyze and data was recorded only for 1446 days (on August 2008). SETI@home has also become a platform for some other studies that rely on computing power.

Over past ten years SETI2home had over 5 million clients all of them aggregated for more than 2 million years of computing time. Currently with more than 300.000 computers in the network SETI@home can compute at 528 TFLOPS beating IBM‘s Blue Gene sustained performance at 478 TFLOPS.

Congratulations to SETI@home project, they proved that distributed computing on a large scale actually works and this was the biggest computational task in human history. Until now they performed more than 10²¹ floating point operations. But the biggest achievement by far is a number of people out there that have the same screen saver for the past ten years.

That is an astonishing accomplishment!

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