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Nick James
ParticipantThanks. I just hope Elon Musk was not watching…
Nick James
ParticipantI heard you mention this during your acceptance yesterday. Amazing stuff.
Nick James
ParticipantThanks all for the feedback. I think it mostly worked well. With the support of the IoP we hope to be able to do this for all our London meetings from now on.
Nick James
ParticipantBefore 2I all of the comets that we know with very slightly hyperbolic orbits acquired the extra velocity through planetary perturbations when they were in the inner Solar System. We would expect comets falling in from the Oort cloud to be in parabolic orbits, i.e. have a velocity of zero at infinity. The largest eccentricity known prior to 2I was 1.057 for C/1980 E1 (Bowell). This large excess velocity (around 3.8 km/s) was acquired from a Jupiter encounter in 1980 December. Comet C/1956 R1 (Arend-Roland) had an exit eccentricity of 1.0002. The pre-perihelion eccentricity was indistinguishable from parabolic. The ultimate end for our comets is to either fall into the Sun or be ejected from our Solar System and become an interstellar comet for some one else.
Nick James
ParticipantAt least when Peter Dunsby discovered Mars (AT 11448 here) he was presented with a nice certificate.
Nick James
ParticipantAs you say, that’s minor planets. Perhaps we should send them a link to Dominic’s site: https://in-the-sky.org/data/planets.php
Nick James
ParticipantSeriously, if an amateur did this they would be crucified although at least we are trusted to post discoveries on TNS. We are not allowed to post to The Astronomer’s Telegram since we can’t be trusted to get things right on our own. I’d be interested to know what checking the MASTER team do before posting their discoveries. Checking for moving objects like asteroids and planets is pretty basic stuff. It would be nice to see a comment on TNS from one of the authors explaining what went wrong but so far nothing.
Nick James
ParticipantPossibly. It could have been an aircraft I suppose but the faint residual image in the next frame looks like a decaying train.
Nick James
ParticipantWell done them. You’d have thought that one of that almost infinitely long list of authors might have checked…
Nick James
ParticipantThat sounds like a fun thing to do although recovering your expensive kit might be challenging. There are rules about launching high altitude met balloons in the UK and a useful FAQ here in case anyone wants to have a go.
22 November 2019 at 7:08 am in reply to: Prediction of high activity of alpha Monocerotid shower #581628Nick James
ParticipantRotten weather here in Chelmsford although my cameras caught a few meteors last night during short gaps in the cloud. There were only small gaps in the cloud at the predicted time of the storm and nothing was picked up then.
Nick James
ParticipantAt 13:47:19. Is it an MD-11?
Nick James
ParticipantLots of showers this morning and a load of clouds around. The seeing is awful and it is blowing a gale but I was lucky at first contact here in Chelmsford. Here is a frame from my video taken at 2019-11-11T12:37:33.
Here’s the animated GIF of first and second contact.
Nick James
ParticipantDavid. Excellent. I can breath easy now.
Nick James
ParticipantYes, 13.4 tonight and moving along at almost 18 arcsec/min.
Nick James
ParticipantHere’s a quick animation I obtained tonight while waiting for it to get dark. These are 10s exposures. 33×22 arcmin field, N up.
Nick James
ParticipantThat is a lot of objects to track and control too.
Nick James
ParticipantThanks. Here’s a short movie taken a little later when it had cleared up. Still a very bright Moon in the sky.
Nick James
ParticipantThanks for the reminder. That’s a great movie. It is cloudy here in Chelmsford at the moment but I did have a few gaps earlier and caught the trail. It is currently around mag 15.3 moving at 7 arcsec/min.
Nick James
Participanthttps://openphdguiding.org/man-dev/Tools.htm#Comet_Tracking
Although I have never used this myself…
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