person:padma a. yanamandra-fisher

#amateur_astronomers keeping an eye on the #comet
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/08/07/amateur-astronomers-keeping-an-eye-on-the-comet

This post is an interview with Padma A. Yanamandra-Fisher, a Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute, USA, and the #rosetta Coordinator of Amateur Observations for 67P/C-G. Q: When did the amateur campaign to observe Rosetta’s comet start? A: The first observations of #Comet_67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by amateur astronomers for this stretch of the comet’s orbit, leading to the 2015 #perihelion, were performed in March 2014. At the time, the comet was very faint and only visible from the southern hemisphere, with a magnitude around 20, just at the limit of detection by small telescopes. In addition, the comet was in a highly dense star field and not always easy to image. From March to November 2014, we received about a dozen or so decent #Images from amateurs located at (...)

#Ground-based_observations ##perihelion2015 #ground-based_observations

Rosetta ground based campaign: calling all amateur astronomers
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/04/08/rosetta-ground-based-campaign-calling-all-amateur-astronomers

This post is based on an article published on the NASA JPL Rosetta science blog. Are you an amateur astronomer? The Rosetta mission has an opportunity for you, one that will allow you to collaborate with professional astronomers and study a #comet in tandem with a real space mission. Padma A. Yanamandra-Fisher, who is the Rosetta Coordinator of Amateur Observations for Comet 67P/C-G, would like to alert the amateur astronomer community and invite them to participate in a campaign to observe this comet during the coming months. She says: “We are looking to bring an entire community of professional and amateur observers together. When else can you observe a comet at the same time a spacecraft is viewing it at close proximity and escorting it to perihelion, and be able to correlate both sets (...)

#Ground-based_observations #activity #ground-based_observations