skeet-shooting

skeet-shooting
 n.— «A special technique, known as “skeet-shooting,” was developed by controllers to cancel out the high speed of the moon relative to Cassini and also help obtain ultra-sharp views as the spacecraft sped past the icy moon at 64,000 kilometers per hour (40,000 miles per hour) on August 11. “Knowing exactly where to point, at just the right time, was critical to this event,” said Paul Helfenstein, Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY., who developed and used the skeet-shoot technique to design the image sequence. “The challenge is equivalent to trying to capture a sharp, unsmeared picture of a distant roadside billboard with a telephoto lens out the window of a speeding car.”» —“Sharpshooting cameras pinpoint origin of Saturn moon’s geysers” by Rich Bowden The Tech Herald (Indianpolis, Indiana) Aug. 15, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

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