Observation by Alex Pratt: Video astrometry of Near-Earth Asteroid ...

Uploaded by

Alex Pratt

Observer

Alex Pratt

Observed

2017 Aug 31 - 20:01

Uploaded

2017 Sep 01 - 11:32

Objects

3122 Florence

Equipment

C11 /f10 @ f/3.3
Watec 910 video camera
IOTA-VTI GPS time inserter
Virtual Dub and Tangra

Exposure

0.16s exposures

Location

Z92

Target name

Asteroid (3122) Florence

Title

Video astrometry of Near-Earth Asteroid (3122) Florence

About this image

This Amor-type Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) is currently doing a flyby of Earth. It's now a mag 9 target for observers in the northern hemisphere and will still be visible at Christmas, when it will have faded to mag 15. It's an ideal object for astrometry and photometry, the latter to obtain lightcurves to model its shape profile. It's a radar target for professional radio telescopes.

I'll be using (3122) Florence as a test object to compare the astrometric O-Cs derived from recordings made with VirtualDub and with OccuRec, and reduced in Tangra. Previous NEOs gave slight differences between the two methods.

The MPC ephemeris for the night of Aug 31 gave a sky motion of 23.5"/min (0.39"/sec). My results gave a value of 0.39"/sec, with 0.10"/sec in RA and 0.38"/sec in Dec and the following sample astrometry from 200 measurements from one of the 1 min videos

03122 n2017 08 31.87568321 04 41.53 -03 22 48.2 9.7 R Z92

Files associated with this observation

3122_20170831_2101_ARP.png (425.5 kB)

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David Swan, David Basey, Jeremy Shears, Peter Mulligan, Peter Carson, Philip Denyer, Dawson

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