Word: langford
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...What makes Sally Langford's discovery so remarkable - and worthy of reporting in the journal Astrobiology on April 6 - is not what she saw, but how she saw it. Once a month over the course of three years, Langford stood huddled against the evening chill in lonely Australian farmland and watched as the east coast of Africa shone in the midday sun. Using little more than a backyard telescope and a clever idea, she became the first person in history to see the continents and oceans of Earth by watching their reflections in the Moon. (See pictures of Earth from...
...crescent Moon in clear skies has probably also noticed that the dark side is not entirely dark. The faint glow rounding out the Moon is earthshine: light from the bright day side of Earth shining on the night side of the Moon. Scientists have studied earthshine for decades - but Langford, along with her colleagues at Melbourne and Princeton Universities, decided it would make a perfect test case for detecting oceans and landmasses on a faraway alien world...
...using a small, amateur-quality telescope hooked up to a low-end digital camera, and running off a car battery on the side of the road, Langford braved the elements ("clouds, rain, hail, fog, gale force winds...") as well as the suspicions of local farmers. "I had someone call the cops on me one time because he thought I was going to steal his alpacas...
...success of the experiment made it all worthwhile. Over the course of each evening, Langford watched the earthshine brighten dramatically when sunlight bounced off the Indian Ocean and dim as the African continent rotated into view. The implications for the exoplanet search are profound: If we can see the effect in earthshine, we might also see it in the light of distant world...
...experiment was surprisingly inexpensive: The whole set-up only cost about $15,000 - next to nothing for a piece of groundbreaking astronomical research. "Earthshine is such a simple idea that we have known about for such a long time," says Langford, "but it makes looking at Earth as a 'prototype' Earth-like planet so easy! An amateur astronomer could definitely take this data...