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Lars/Paul, That’s a great start with the plate solving. Now we just need to know which comets passed through those points to get the observation date and time. More difficult will be identifying the observers!
I too am surprised that astrometry.net is so good with trailed stars/
You’re right, but two mags is quite a lot. I doubt if it would be anywhere near that and would only apply to satellites under control since it is on only one face. Since quite a few are tumbling already it may not be very effective. From our point of view I think we will become more dependent on large numbers of short exposures and clever stacking software. CMOS cameras have come along at just the right time.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll speak with the AV people at the IoP and will try to improve this for future meetings.
A recording of the entire event is online at the original URL given at the top of this thread. You can scroll through to find the best bits.
Thanks 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.
Before 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.
At least when Peter Dunsby discovered Mars (AT 11448 here) he was presented with a nice certificate.
As 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
Seriously, 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.
Possibly. It could have been an aircraft I suppose but the faint residual image in the next frame looks like a decaying train.
Well done them. You’d have thought that one of that almost infinitely long list of authors might have checked…
That 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.
Rotten 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.
Lots 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.
