Italian Optical SETI Searches at FOAM13 Observatory
- Paper number
IAC-12,A4,1,8,x13108
- Author
Dr. Claudio Maccone, International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), Italy
- Coauthor
Dr. Giuseppe Savio, FOAM13 Observatory, Italy
- Coauthor
Dr. Alberto Villa, IEEE Member - FOAM13 Observatory, Italy
- Coauthor
Mr. Roberto Crippa, President FOAM13 Observatory, Italy
- Year
2012
- Abstract
Italy has now (2012) an Optical SETI Research facility, in addition to the traditional Radio SETI facility at Medicina (near Bologna), run by Stelio Montebugnoli and co-workers since 1998. The Italian Optical SETI Program is run at the FOAM13 Observatory near Tradate, Varese province, Lombardy region, Italy, web site http://www.foam13.it/. The acronym FOAM13 literally means “Fondazione Osservatorio Astronomico Messier 13” after the famous first SETI Message towards the M13 Globular Cluster sent by Frank Drake on 16 November 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope. The OSETI instrumentation at FOAM13 was entirely created by the skills and hard work of co-authors Giuseppe Savio and Alberto Villa. Co-author Roberto Crippa, in his position of Observatory Director, provided the necessary funds and strong support. Finally, the first author of this paper, in his position as SETI Coordinator at FOAM13, suggested the first targets to be explored: namely, the new extrasolar planets recently discovered by the US “Kepler” space mission, plus some extrasolar planets previously discovered by the European CoRoT mission. In this paper we present the first comprehensive Report about all the OSETI searches done so far at the FOAM13 Observatory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first set of OSETI Searches ever done in Continental Europe, although we are aware that other European Teams are now on the same way as us to let the European OSETI become a reality.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)