Announcement - J65

Congrats Dave, lets hope your success will serve as an inspiration for many more recognised Irish observatories.

Bart.

Cheers lads - I hope, as Bart says, that some of you will give this a go. Its not as difficult as you might think, but its not easy either.

Dave L and Michael O'C - you should both be pretty well placed to do this - if you need any help, just holler.

As for the party Seanie, I'll try and get something sorted - do you know any good DJ's?

Dave P and Trevor - thanks. As for getting into the history books, I think there's a way to go yet but I'll definately have to avoid that astronomer reputation

Cheers and thanks again - both for your comments and as I said before, all your help in getting me to this point.

Dave

Seanie, with your dome and new scope, how's about Tullamore giving astrometry a lash?

Dave,
So what exactly are you reporting to these people, is it the position?, you say above that you can detect tiny fractions of an arcsecond in position for the asteroids, there's just no way I can do that with my mount, it doesnt have that kind of resolution, so thats me out.
Are you also doing brightness/magnitude measurement of the asteroids?

Dave - position data is what the MPC requires. Funnily enough, I don't know exactly how accurate that data needs to be - I can only give you my accuracy because I know that was what was accepted.

I'd be very sceptical that you can't do this by the way. If you can image, without perceptible star trails, at f/6.3 for more than 30 seconds, you can do this. Another way, if you can image an object dimmer than mag 15 (possibly even less) with tight stars, you can do this.

The process is to take the image then, er, let the software do the rest

Voila!

Magnitude observations (photometry) are much harder to do - feedback from others suggests that a typically hobbyist will take a good while (months) to learn the techniques to a satisfactory level.

You can optionally report magnitudesbut so far, mine are all usually at least 0.25 mags out of synch with reality. But that's no surprise.

The data I submitted, whilst the accuracy looks scary, is do-able if you can image mag 15 plus without trailing. By the way, some of my measurements were horrific.... Of course, they weren't submitted.

If you're going to Turkey, we can chat about this over a beer or two

Cheers
Dave

Super stuff Dave

I think you should be renamed 'Trojan' from now on
I get astrometry from guys on my variables star lists, the data they provide in pinning down stars is incredible! Fair play.

Keith..