(meteorobs) Seeing the Deep Impact impact flare from Earth!

[Daniel Fischer]

There has been deafening silence on this list w.r.t. the Deep Impact story
which apparently most subscribers think has nothing to do with meteors - WRONG!
At http://outreach.jach.hawaii.edu/pressroom/2005-deepimpactlight you can read
that the thermal flare of the impact has been videorecorded from Hawaii with
a rather small telescope. My gut feeling is that amateur astronomers could
have done that, too, e.g. with those Mintron and Watec cameras popular among
meteor observers. I'm just investigating how bright the feature actually was
and what kind of instrument one might have needed; is anyone aware of similar
successes by amateurs (i.e. sightings of the initial flare, not the ejecta
cloud that was quite evident in the following hours)?

Daniel Fischer

(DI-blogging on at http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~dfischer/stories/deep ...)