Announcement - J65

Thanks folks - appreciate it.

Dave G - you wouldn't want me to get electrocuted now, would you...

Michael - its pretty tough, but certainly do-able. I could well imagine a Monasterevin Observatory - you could definitely do it.

The biggest problem was keeping ahead of the weather. You have to image at least two asteroids greater in number than 400, preferably diffent magnitudes and preferably slow movers. You image them over two nights (which do not have to be consecutive) and on each night, you shoot two or three images each, an hour apart.

After plate solving you report the values and send in the report. And voila, if your measurements are good enough, you get an observatory code.

The reporting procedure is tricky enough - for example, I described my telescope as 0.2m but was told I reported it incorrectly - it should have been 0.2-m But they didn't hold it against me

As far as accuracy goes, I've been getting RA results down to
+/- 00 00 00.00 and Dec down to +/- 00 00 00.0 (ie - bang on the money)

My averages are more like +/- 00 00 00.03 and +/- 00 00 00.3. ie within about 3 hundredths of an arcsec in RA and 3 tenths of an arcsec in Dec. That seems to be good enough for the MPC.

You need a good catalogue for plate solving - GSC 1.1 is what I based all my measurements on but I'm now using USNO A2.0 (an 8 gig download). I'd love to get USNO- B1.0 but at 80 gigs, its rather large

If anyone is interested, here's the best spot to go:

cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/info/Astrometry.html

See section 12

All the best and thanks again

Dave

If you're interested, here's the MPC Observation report I submitted. If anyone wants it deciphered, let me know

www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...775111-Batch0001.txt

Cheers

Dave

Well Done dave.

I might give this a try also, presuming we get some good weather.

Well done Dave
You'd want to be careful or you might get a reputation as some kind of astronomer!
That's pretty amazing and what a first to get! You're slowly making your way into th history books.

Dave P

Dave,
well done! Kudos to you, your set up, and your work! When is the star party??

Michael,
thinking about doing something like this?