The observatory where UAE calendar is decided
▶ To coincide with Islamic new year, Roberta Pennington meets the stargazers who help shape our lives
Members of the International Astronomical Centre gather every month on top of Jebel Hafeet in Al Ain with their cameras and telescopes pointed at the night sky.
The Moon observation ritual has been continuing since the centre’s chairman Mohammed Odeh started the Islamic Crescents Observation Project nearly 20 years ago with a small group of international astronomers to record celestial algorithms.
The data compiled by the group project is used to guide the decisions of the official Moon-sighting committee, made up of Islamic scholars and scientists, who determine when to begin and end Islamic holidays.
This week, the centre’s data was used to help determine the dates and prayer times for the UAE’s first official, unified Hijri calendar for 1439.
“Based on crescent sightings, we start Ramadan, we start Eid,” Mr Odeh said. “So these astronomical issues are very important in our community and our objective is to do important work that benefits our community.”
When a couple of fireballs streaked over Saudi Arabia on two nights in a month in 2014, Saudi media and officials called Mr Odeh and the centre to investigate.
“There was a very bright fireball in the sky and they asked us to comment on what people had seen,” he said. “At that time no one was aware that it was not a natural object nor celestial object.
“After investigating for about five or six days, we concluded that it was not a natural object, it was not a meteorite. It was satellite debris.”
The experience prompted the centre to expand beyond supplying lunar data for the Islamic Crescents Observation Project.
“We thought about organising a programme to monitor these objects – not only to monitor but to keep track of such events,” Mr Odeh said.
For the next three years, the centre worked with the UAE Space Agency to establish the UAE Astronomical Cameras Network, which the centre’s executive director, Samer Hakawati, said was the first in the region dedicated to identifying and tracking meteors, meteorites and space debris.
The network, which was launched last year, comprises three stations: one in Remah, Al Ain; another in Razeen near the Empty Quarter, about 100 kilometres east of Abu Dhabi; and a third along the border with Oman, north of Al Qoaa.
Each station has 17 cameras programmed to start recording when a meteor is detected.
Data from the stations are fed into the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance network, a project founded and run by scientist Peter Jenniskens.
The American meteor astronomer works at the Seti Institute in California, a Nasa-affiliated, non-profit organisation dedicated to scientific research and education.
“There are no other monitoring stations but us in the Middle East,” Mr Hakawati said. “It’s one of the best stations around the world. We are covering the UAE but we can observe the whole world.”
As if timed to test the stations’ readiness, a meteorite shot towards the capital last year, a month after the second station had been opened, lighting up the cameras for their big debut night-time capture.
“From this detection we were able to calculate the exact trajectory of the meteor and then we determined the location of impact, which was very close to Abu Dhabi, somewhere close to Al Raha Mall,” Mr Odeh said.
A team from the centre scoured the area for hours
but turned up only rocks and asphalt.
“We estimated its diameter to be between 1 and 3 centimetres,” Mr Odeh said. “So to find such a small stone in an area that was about 3 kilometres by 5km was challenging.”
After the flashes of light over Saudi in 2014, the centre also launched Satellite Re-entry Watch, an educational
website where amateur and professional astronomers can register sightings of satellites, rockets or other pieces of manmade space debris returning to Earth.
The meteorite and satellite reports are shared with the public in Arabic through the centre’s social media accounts.
“We can do the calculations to locate the general area
where it will fall,” Mr Odeh said. “We can tell the people, ‘be careful, it might fall in this area or that area’.”
This month, the centre is expanding its reach by offering astronomy workshops to children and adults at its headquarters in Al Bateen and also in Dubai. The centre also plans to host public viewings during meteor showers this year.
“We are doing our best to have bigger projects, to have more projects that have a direct effect on the people.
“We dream of having a big observatory in Abu Dhabi, with big telescopes, and a planetarium. We have many telescopes, but not to the level of an observatory. If we can succeed in this, I would say it would be a great achievement.”