Asteroid 4 Vesta

[SilverAstro]

On 23/01/2017 at 18:54, JimT said:

This is the result of one shot tonight to check I had the right target, left photo is from last night, right one is from tonight.

Nice one, well caught !

I've just done a similar thing, found it in a crop of  a wider-field view of Gemini and went back the next night to check, I've just posted an animated gif of it in the "Getting started with imaging" section : here

[SilverAstro]

On 23/01/2017 at 23:03, furrysocks2 said:

Purely for fun, I aligned three of the images above - taken, I believe, on three consecutive nights.

I have no idea how to resolve these, or whether it's even possible without further data.

Yes, it is possible to determine an approx orbit with just three obs. ( was it Newton came up with a method ? ), of a newly found asteroid,  the wider the obs are spaced the better the initial orbit and usually good enough to predict where the asteroid will be in the near future to recover it and refine its orbit. (sorry dont remember the details, been too many decades since )

Done all the time by the minor planet people so there may be some further info there : http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/

or perhaps http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/mpc.html

 

[SilverAstro]

Ah it would seem that my memory is not up to muster !

Gauss not Newton ! and the recovering of Ceres problem

Google 'orbit estimation' > Wiki > hold on to you hat for the full maths   :- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss'_method

[furrysocks2]

7 minutes ago, SilverAstro said:

Ah it would seem that my memory is not up to muster !

Gauss not Newton ! and the recovering of Ceres problem

Google 'orbit estimation' > Wiki > hold on to you hat for the full maths   :- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss'_method

Makes it look easy...

Thanks for that.

[SilverAstro]

1 minute ago, furrysocks2 said:

Makes it look easy...

Thanks for that.

Yer, that's what I thought  - not !

So I wrote a quick prog. to do it , ,  -not !!

OrbFit and Find_Orb look interesting   :   http://adams.dm.unipi.it/orbfit/  :  http://www.projectpluto.com/find_orb.htm

[ArmyAirForce]

Nice to see others after the smaller solar system bodies. I too caught Vesta on the same night, and also used Stellarium and GOTO to track it down and confirm the location. One catch with my DSLR and a two pane GIF animation with my ASI120MM, both on the Skywatcher 200PDS. I was surprised as to the speed of movement.

ASI120MM images. Each frame is about 25 minutes apart. The image is taken at 1 metre focal length.

[Davey-T]

Tonights image of Vesta.

Dave

 

[Davey-T]

And tonights Vesta, just managed between the clouds moving and the fog arriving.

Dave

 

[Davey-T]

First Vesta image for a while tonight.

Dave

 

 

 

[Davey-T]

Vesta tonight ( I think ) getting hard to tell it from the stars, haven't plate solved it so hope it's right 

Dave

 

[SilverAstro]

5 hours ago, Davey-T said:

Vesta tonight ( I think )

I think perhaps not I think that could be TYC1919-353-1 ! ? The other one of that bright little pair by your arrow being TYC1919-387-1 ? Sadly when I brought up the label for 4Vesta it obliterated the group of 4 stars close by forming a right-angle thus I have included a clean plot from CduC showing Vesta as the yellow dot at the head of my red arrow.

By my CduC :-

 

 

[furrysocks2]

I think Vesta is here:

[SilverAstro]

that makes  two of us ! same as my red arrow in my first pic of/on Dave's image

[furrysocks2]

Nice.

[Davey-T]

Thanks guys, just did a quick eyeball on Stellarium, similar little group at a glance, at least I caught it, been at it since early December so may call it a day now and try to animate it 

Dave

[furrysocks2]

1 minute ago, Davey-T said:

Thanks guys, just did a quick eyeball on Stellarium, similar little group at a glance, at least I caught it, been at it since early December so may call it a day now and try to animate it 

Dave

You're scale and rotation have been very consistent, I've been aligning the odd time in GIMP - I blinked these last two to identify Vesta.

I may come back to these and see what I can make of Vesta's orbit again.

Cheers, and nicely done.