Book Project: Discovering Asteroids

[Ags]

I am trying to bag a few asteroids next year, so I decided some finder charts would be helpful, so I am working on a book to guide me through the coming year. The format is simple - just some widefield overview charts to show what's up, and the detailed charts showing stars down to magnitude 11 to pick out the little things in the star field. The data is coming from the NASA Horizons service.

I am hoping to make a few animations of the fainter ones, and of course some naked-eye spotting of the brighter ones.

Here are a few sample pages (note there is currently a bug in the RA/DEC grid causing it to be horribly out of alignment):

I am rebuilding my code for generating charts to make them more modular and layered, so there are a few issues at the moment with label scaling, clip boxes and so on, but I hope once it is done my codebase will be a lot more maintainable!

Edited December 15, 2023 by Ags

[Ags]

I sorted out the misalignment of the RA/DEC grid, and cleaned up the code that handles label positioning.  I will be able to start on the writing aspects of the book soon - 150 asteroids to research.

[Ags]

One concern I have is ensuring that the coordinate systems for the background stars and the asteroids (which have different data sources) are in alignment. I realized tonight I can simply generate charts for known historical occultations to verify this. I had hoped to verify directly with a little photography but it seems when it's not cloudy it's foggy.

[Ags]

Milky Way fuzz, a good thing or a bad thing in a star chart?

I am always jealous of other star chart publications with Milky Way fuzz, this is my latest effort based on star densities from the Tycho 2 catalog (2.5 million stars). I need to cartoonify it a bit (make midtones darker, and dark tones less dark). Star clusters come out as very blocky fuzz, so I need to change the algorithm a bit...

[JeremyS]

IMO it’s not needed especially on a minor planet chart.

[Ags]

2 hours ago, JeremyS said:

IMO it’s not needed especially on a minor planet chart.

I think it can be quite helpful to have an indication of how busy the star field is when chasing down  something faint and star-like like an asteroid. If I realised a faint asteroid was tracking through a crowded field, I'd devote my observing time to something else.

Thinking of making the fuzz red so it disappears with a red light torch. 

Edited December 10, 2023 by Ags

[Paul M]

Nice book idea and a fun project!

I'm a romantic so like to see the Milky Way, at least where the scale is appropriate. Plainly, it's not needed and brings nothing to the usefulness of the charts. So I'd ignore me

One thing I look for every now and again is the conjunction of asteroids on highly divergent paths, such that it would make a dramatic animation. Unfortunately there is a dearth of relatively bright, high inclination asteroids to feed my idea but plenty of main belters, just waiting.

Good luck with the book, are you publishing it, or is it just a personal project?

 

[Ags]

@Paul M there's no place for romantics in this world, but I can certainly accommodate you on the overview charts!

Regarding asteroid conjunctions - it is a good idea and one I can easily script. I will look at adding this to the book too. Likewise conjunctions with planets and bright Messiers.

Edited December 10, 2023 by Ags

[Ags]

I am moving over to use this mature cross-referenced derivation of the Tycho 2 catalog built by David Nash:

http://astronexus.com/hyg

It replaces my own collection of cross-referenced catalogs and increases the number of stars available for charting by a factor of about 20 - most of those stars are too faint to be usable directly but can be used in e.g. star field density mapping. For the zoomed in charts, I need to show fainter stars, based on my initial tests of those charts, I think down to mag. 10.

To cope with the larger number of stars, I have added some multithreading to my process. There's an old joke about multithreading: A programmer who uses multithreading to solve one problem now problems two has.

 

[Ags]

I added 319 Leona as a test case, looks like I am matching the asteroid ephemeris to the field stars without issues as the Betelgeuse occultation is correct:

 

Edited December 12, 2023 by Ags

[Swoop1]

@Ags- not a comment re the book/ format, but a question about the amount of work you are doing.

Does the observers latitude have any noticeable effect on plotting things like the above occultation?

[Ags]

Yes, but not enough to affect a chart. The asteroid is beyond Mars, so if you place Earth in your mind's eye at the asteroid's location, it would only be a couple of dozen arcseconds in size, which would be the parallax observed by observers standing at our north and south poles.

[Ags]

I managed to briefly test my charts in a fleeting clear and relatively moonless spell. I quickly reached the conclusion I needed to chart fainter stars. My previous catalogs didn't have good coverage of stars below magnitude 9, so I integrated a new catalog, and charted all stars down to magnitude 10, which is the magnitude that works for me. Besides anything deeper would have made the charts for too crowded to use. I also added a 1-degree field-of-view circle around the asteroid's point of maximum brightness. Increasing the depth of the charts immediately led to memory issues while building the book - Java could not allocate a large enough byte array for example, so I had to rework this and that.

Looks like Vesta will put on a fine display in early May:

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Ags

[marybarr]

On 19/11/2023 at 21:52, Ags said:

I am trying to bag a few asteroids next year, so I decided some finder charts would be helpful, so I am working on a book to guide me through the coming year. The format is simple - just some widefield overview charts to show what's up, and the detailed charts showing stars down to magnitude 11 to pick out the little things in the star field. The data is coming from the NASA Horizons service.

I am hoping to make a few animations of the fainter ones, and of course some naked-eye spotting of the brighter ones.

Here are a few sample pages (note there is currently a bug in the RA/DEC grid causing it to be horribly out of alignment):

I am rebuilding my code for generating charts to make them more modular and layered, so there are a few issues at the moment with label scaling, clip boxes and so on, but I hope once it is done my codebase will be a lot more maintainable! It's good that in my university I have a course in astrology, and a good professor, who helps me a lot with that process by providing some information and recommendations. And you know, for me writing a book is easier than writing a paper. Sometimes it takes me a lot of time and not I can succeed. From time to time I use https://essays.edubirdie.com/pay-for-essay because for me it's much better than the missed deadline. And I dedicate a lot of time to my book, but I hope to find a balance and work on those skills because education is also important.

Amazing book idea.

Is it hard to work on such a project?

Edited January 17 by marybarr

[Paul M]

On 10/12/2023 at 19:12, Ags said:

there's no place for romantics in this world,

Yes, I discovered that at an early age, but really, y'all don't know what you're missing! 😇

[Ags]

38 minutes ago, marybarr said:

Amazing book idea.

Is it hard to work on such a project?

Tech writing is my day job, so all the technical aspects are doable, but we are struggling with the details like label placement. The book's 95% done but those last 5%...

[mickf41]

Engaging in the creation of finder charts for asteroids using NASA Horizons data is an exciting project! The simplicity of the format, encompassing widefield overview charts and detailed ones down to magnitude 11, appears highly effective. Best of luck with your asteroid spotting endeavors! Additionally, incorporating animations adds an extra dimension to the project. If you require assistance in articulating your achievements and goals, sop services can be invaluable in crafting a compelling and impactful statement of purpose for your academic or professional pursuits. 🌌🔭

 

Edited February 4 by mickf41

[AstroMuni]

On 11/12/2023 at 06:55, Ags said:

To cope with the larger number of stars, I have added some multithreading to my process. There's an old joke about multithreading: A programmer who uses multithreading to solve one problem now problems two has.

Great work to put together all this info into a book.

Is there a reason you are compiling a book instead of releasing an app that can generate these charts?

[Ags]

I like to go out visual observing without electronics. But many of these targets are exceedingly faint, so for those I am more likely to key in the RA and Dec coordinates into a computer thing. That's why the book also includes an ephemeris table for each object.

I've toyed with writing an app (I have written a few) but there are many excellent astronomy apps already.

[Ags]

Last night I finished writing the potted descriptions of all asteroids featured in the book. I can move on to writing the intro sections now. We are about 30% through editing the charts.

[Ags]

Chart editing is finished so we are now sending off for a print copy to do a final edit and also review the cosmetic aspects we've introduced with this book.

[Ags]

I have still got to write a lot of frontmatter, but I have lots of new astrotoys distracting me at the moment 😀

[M40]

In your list of asteroids, have you included some of the minor planets in your list? Noted you mentioned Vesta in an earlier post.

[Ags]

Do you mean dwarf planets - I include Ceres and Pluto only. You want me to add the larger TNOs?

[M40]

I was thinking of asteroid belt items only. Designations are interesting aren't they, it seems that minor planet Lutetia is also asteroid 21 and minor planet Vesta is asteroid 4. So will you be including things like Lutetia in your list?

I think tno's are somewhat out of my league.