Huachuca Astronomy Club—Speakers
Tom Kaye


"Arizona Desert Fireball Array," Detecting Incoming Meteors in Arizona," by Tom Kaye


Tom Kaye [above] talked about the Arizona Desert Fireball Array at the Feb. 26, 2010 meeting of the Huachuca Astronomy Club at Cochise College, Sierra Vista, Arizona. Photo by Del Gordon

On February 26, 2010, Tom Kaye gave a presentation to the Huachuca Astronomy Club about a government-sponsored project, run by Sandia Labs, that has developed meteor cameras and software to automatically detect incoming fireballs. Given our prime location and weather in Arizona, their group, known as the Arizona Desert Fireball Array, was given five video cameras to act as a “net” to catch images of meteors. This equipment only allowed detection and their group has since expanded the array’s capability by developing software to analyze fireballs caught on more than one camera to generate flight paths through the atmosphere, speeds, and possible impact points on the ground. They have also added spectroscopic capability and seek to be the first team to record a meteor's spectrum in the atmosphere, and then recover it on the ground for comparison. The talk included descriptions of the equipment, events, and future prospects.

Bio: Tom Kaye is a non-professional astronomer at Raemor Vista Observatory in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and is the director of the Foundation for Scientific Advancement. Most of his work involves spectroscopic analysis in astronomy, paleontology, and forensics.

Tom Kaye, an amateur paleontologist and astronomer, stands in the dining area of his Sierra Vista home. The bronze sculpture in the foreground is of a Pachycephalosaur, and the 65 million-year-old leg bone on the table belongs to a Tricertops. The Brontothere mammal skull on the right isn’t classified as a dinosaur because it is only 35 million years old. (Mark Levy-Herald/Review)

Tom Kaye

Tom Kaye is a recent transplant (as of 2008) to Sierra Vista from Chicago. Due to 24-hour daylight in the Chicago area, he became interested in spectroscopy as a last resort. He now leads a team of high-level amateurs under the banner Spectrashift.com with the goal of discovering an extrasolar planet. They have already built a spectrograph capable of high-precision radial velocity measurements down to better than 200 m/s. They used this instrument to detect the known exoplanet around the star tau Boo and published the results in a peer-reviewed journal, proving that amateurs can measure redshifts.

Finding and Grinding a 1-Meter Mirror Presentation, Nov. 2008 (2MB, PDF)

HAC Meeting: Sep. 19, 2008, Cochise College, Sierra Vista, Arizona

"Finding and Grinding a One-Meter Mirror: The Hope, The Dream, and the Ugly Reality,"
Tom Kaye

A lighthearted look at the trials and tribulations of grinding your first mirror—especially when it weighs almost half a ton! The Spectrashift Project has been on an eight-year quest to find, grind and build a one-meter-plus telescope. A big mirror is a dream of many amateur astronomers, but the reality of such a project can not be comprehended at the start. This talk will go through the search for a blank, the machine to grind it, and the instrument to measure it. Highlighted are the disasters from almost dropping nine hundred pounds of glass, why everything you thought you knew doesn’t count, and how a project like this tests your sanity. If you ever thought about how cool it would be to build your own big telescope, you must hear this talk first.

Tom Kaye's Spectrashift Web Page

Tom Kaye's Personal Web Page



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