At at party this weekend, I met Cisco engineer Landon Curt Noll. He had a rack of three digital SLRs on a telescope mount, and was getting ready to ship his gear to China in order to observe the upcoming solar eclipse.
Noll’s an amateur astronomer, and he’s searching for Vulcanoid asteroids, which, if they exist, would orbit near the plane of the ecliptic within the orbit of Mercury.
Since they are close to the Sun, finding them remains a challenge. That’s why Noll’s going to a Chinese desert, near the Mongolian border, with three customized digital SLRs (he’s on good terms with Canon’s engineers) that will image the swath of the ecliptic close to the Sun but out of the corona during totality.
Big telescopes aren’t lucky enough to sit under the path of an eclipse’s totality, and space based observatories such as the Hubble can’t look near the sun, or are designed to look at the Sun (and aren’t sensitive enough to look for small rocks, 83 trillion times dimmer than the sun.) So this is a hunt where amateur astronomers, equipped with high tech cameras and mounts, will make the big discoveries.
Noll leaves for China next week, and he’ll give several talks on his work on the way to setting up for the observations during the eclipse.
