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Alex – Yes exactly that. Urban areas that are badly light polluted (i.e. counting 10 or less stars is the criterion) seem to have improved somewhat.
I suspect that the darkest skies may have deteriorated slightly.
I have some peripheral involvement with the CPRE Star Count and we know that the weather badly affected reporting in 2022 cf. 2021.
I know that National CPRE used paid ads on Facebook to help spread the word in 2021 and several local groups also promoted it.
I intend to get actively involved in promoting the 2023 effort.Good to have this update on that particular aspect of remote telescope time.
Another possibility that Grant is well aware of (he has used this for variable nebulae studies) is the Europlanet Telescope Network.
Early last month I had an online meeting with several interested parties closely involved in the ETN, and I am planning on progressing the BAA’s further involvement after several weeks delay on my part – That will be an offline discussion once I’ve submitted a report to Council on the subject.Richard Miles
Well done guys !
The Handbook has some historical value.
Interesting how the Asteroids part has evolved over the years as new objects and new classes of object are discovered. Similarly the opportunities for observing asteroid occultations has grown dramatically and continue to improve as Gaia completes its work over the next few years.
Michael – Great!
There are various lists of asteroids named after people but the key is to use the citation to verify such a name refers to an actual BAA member and not just a person having teh same name as a member.
On the subject of discoverers who are members, it used to be a pain finding out who had discovered one or more asteroids, but not anymore since last September the following page has appeared on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planet_discoverers
Richard
Hi Michael.
About 14 years ago I started to compile such a list in the form of a spreadsheet but gave up as it was, at that time, difficult to find all the necessary info. Since then the Web has gone from strength to strength and it is definitely much easier to glean that information. If you like we could work together to update my original spreadsheet? Are you keen to give it a go? We would just work together under data protection rules to achieve this.
I had an ulterior reason for compiling the list – that is to run a project under ARPS to observe these objects and to discover their rotation rates. Fortunately we now know these values for some thousands of asteroids and so maybe a lot less work would be involved than originally envisaged.
Thanks for posting that Michael.
At some 1km across it is very large and being only about 2 million km from us it turns out to be the brightest NEO in the last 4-5 years reaching magnitude 10 and so very observable. You have caught it the evening after closest approach when it was still bright at 11th magnitude.
Thanks Alex for letting folk know about this new survey that looks to have started on December 13.
It’s quite a straightforward, easy survey to complete. My two-penneth has been added as an individual amateur. I see that it is possible for an amateur organisation to respond via a group response. Maybe the BAA has a ‘corporate’ view on some of the items in the survey?
I encourage all interested amateurs having a view on Pro-Am matters to complete the survey, which is a worldwide one.
You can tell we are well into the 21st Century when you see detailed images of asteroids measuring small fractions of an arcsecond in size. The paper includes density measurements of these bodies, which is rather amazing.
There again, the latest BAA Journal has some amateur images of Mars, Uranus and Neptune that were unthinkable say 50 years ago!
Len – Thanks for that – Alan Bowden, one of the named authors is an old friend of mine – I could follow it up with him.
Hello there Jeremy – I don’t have an answer but I see the photo is by a certain Mike Peel.
A chap of the same name used to be a BAA and VSS member. Is this the same MP, and has he rejoined if so I would be very pleased to know that. Mike used to live in Lancashire.
Might you try and contact the photographer to see if he has anymore info.
Richard
Thanks Paul for highlighting this discovery, which is remarkable and shows what is possible when a large 4m scope (DECam Survey) searches the twilight sky. As well as the shortest known period, 2021 PH27 also has the highest precession rate of 53.5 arcseconds per century (a consequence of general relativity in operation), i.e. gretaer than that of Mercury.
As to the Handbook for 2022 that goes to the printers tomorrow! But in any case, it wouldn’t get a mention under any of the various categories. Usually we try and put stuff in that means they can be observed by amateurs. It might be worthwhile to list Inner Earth Objects provided that they can reach say mag 20 at some point in the year plus some criterion as to teh lowest practical solar elongation. Of course the two are inter-related so we might have to use a sliding scale of acceptability which is a function of both magnitude and elongation. If you have a go at reaching it next March and succeed that would help to set the limits. At about mag 16 the limit is an elongation of about 19 degrees for our UK latitudes. Ther may be a problem about adding a new category to the Handbook and that is the number of pages limit. To add the Exoplanet data I had to shorten the brighter asteroid Asteroid Ephemerides.
Richard
Eamonn Ansboro has been a keen observer of TNOs and John Saxton has measured a rotational lightcurve too.
The orbits of the brighter ones are well tied down and very few bright ones are discovered.
I’ve done the latest list for the 2022 Handbook and since 2014 only one bright TNO in the Top 25 has been found, namely 2018 VG18.
Of course the most effective thing that amateurs can do is to observe stellar occultations by TNOs.
Richard
What a shame it was cloudy here.
My wife was gardening and the sounds were unmistakable as they went on for nearly 10 seconds she reported. Sadly looks to have undergone a watery end in The Channel. Thanks for everyone’s contributions.
Denis – From the composition it will be possible then to come up with some answers. Such small meteoroids have a high chance of being fragments from a collision in the not so distant past. Knowing its orbit is really helpful – so it had an aphelion at the outer edge of the Main Belt and so would have been ejected from that region to become an Earth-crosser.
Primitive CCs are chemically modified by contact with liquid water. The samples collected so far have escaped this fate. Covid or no Covid a special effort should be made today to find more!
Thanks Andrew.
I see that Buil comments: “For normal camera use it is mandatory to select the « Even illumination » option (accessible also from the ASCOM interface). If you set this option on, the gradient disappears – in this situation the Atik Horizon camera works properly ” Wayne’s images have a vertical gradient to the background, especially when flatfields are generated, which have short exposure times. So turning off this strange progressive shutter is absolutely essential if photometry is the purpose!
Thanks Paul for flagging this unusual asteroid and the S&T article, which is nicely written.
This object is stable around L4 for a few thousand years at least but looks to be moved around by interactions with Venus. The observational arc is still rather short whilst it is now heading for low solar elongation and has not been observed for over 3 weeks so at almost 22nd magnitude it looks to have moved out of range for a while. Somebody commented on FaceBook about the ‘XL5’ part of its designation – it shows their age or their interest in ‘Fireballs’ !
Wow Dominic – What a transformation! Well done!
I couldn’t believe it when I started playing with what is now searchable. Several tens of thousands of comet images for instance. I had been planning on researching Comet 29P coma morphologies over the years’ of observations but have kept putting it off because of the laborious prospect. Now, in principle, anyone can trawl the Comet Section archive and get involved in that type of study. People may be willing to volunteer to measure images as part of a team effort since these image data are now available and downloadable to all members.
