|
The central portion (~4 arcmin.) of one of the images of the
72-inch. The asteroid is moving along the red line and is
identified by the green circle. Three of the comparison
stars used are identified in the image. |
I have arrived back at home with a hard drive full of pictures and data. Although we processed our data every day to see what we had and to evaluate if we needed to change observing strategies, the final processing is yet to come. We plan to do a process of converting the instrumental magnitudes we obtained of the asteroids to the standard system of magnitudes determined back in the 1960's. There are now multiple magnitude systems, but we will stay with the Johnsons-Cousins system since we used those photometric filters on the 72-inch. In the future, everyone will be using the Sloan filter set made famous by the more recent Sloan Telescope. However, for the next couple of years, we do not have sufficient comparison stars in all fields to do this. We can always go back and reanalyze our data later if we see the need.
I use Brian Warner's program Canopus to analyze the asteroid data. This is quickly becoming the industry standard. Brian Skiff at Lowell uses it for all his work. We got 3 or 4 nights on the two asteroids, which is not enough to accurately determine the rotational period. However, the Near Earth Asteroid is easily bright enough to obtain more data from GMARS, and my new 16-inch is just barely large enough to follow the Trojan. From a 72" to a 16". I guess beggars can't be choosers.
No comments:
Post a Comment