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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…
Nick James
ParticipantWell, given the position, it is possibly Leda but I don’t think you could be sure unless you had multiple stacks which showed the blob moving at the correct rate. If you try this in future you will want to get a long enough series of subs that you can make two separate stacks, each of which have enough SNR to get astrometry of the object. Once you have confirmed it by its motion you can always stack the whole set to get a higher SNR. That’s what I did with this faint comet which was about the same magnitude as Leda.
Nick James
ParticipantGood try Paul but that’s the trouble with faint objects in busy starfields! When you say it is “in about the right place” could you quantify in terms of arcsec? Leda’s ephemeris will be very good. Normally, in cases like this, you would produce two stacks at different times and check that the object’s motion is consistent with the ephemeris. You may not have enough subs to do this in which case the identification will always be iffy.
Nick James
ParticipantTry this:
http://www.nickdjames.com/astrolinux/utils_ubuntu18.tgz
The tools are all dynamically linked so you will need the libraries but they are all available for Ubuntu. I think the following should get them all:
apt install libcfitsio-dev
apt install libgd-dev
apt install libnetpbm10-dev
apt install wcslib-devNick.
Nick James
ParticipantPaul,
I have a VM running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I’ll build you a version of the tools in that. Hopefully that will work on your system. If not I’ll have a look at linking the libs statically and, failing all that I’ll give you the source (with an NDA!).
Nick.
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