Day #23

This week I've just been processing all of the data I have amassed. I got some really great pictures of 2008 BT18. My first set of these had an exposure length of 40 seconds so they looked like dashes on the frame. I then got some more with an exposure length of only 2.5 seconds. I took all these from the same telescope position. They make a great movie showing the spherical asteroid travel across space over eleven pictures. Overall, my spreadsheets have turned out well. Most of my data seems to be within the uncertainty bounds given by HORIZONS. In several cases though, my data seems to be consistently about half an arcsecond greater than HORIZONS. I'm not sure the cause of this discrepancy. It could possibly be the altitude of PROMPT.

Day #22

The past few days I've been analyzing the data I was able to get from Maxim DL. Since I now have the positions of 2008 LG2 in my photos, I have something to compare with the HORIZONS database. Therefore, I told HORIZONS to generate me an ephimeris for 2008 LG2 at the time (down to the minute) the pictures were taken. Right now, I am in the process of plotting the values HORIZONS generates with those I have taken from my pictures. This involves a lot of Excel work and conversions, so its keeping me busy. From what I am starting to see now, my RA's are almost exactly the same. My declination coordinates seem to stray from the HORIZONS data at two places. I might need to go back and make sure I got the best coordinate value from my pictures at those two points.

Day #21

Today was a great day. When Dr. Crider and I were working yesterday with Starry Night, I noticed that a few of the stars it identified could be found in the USNO catalogue but not necessarily the default GSC one. Today I got on Maxim DL, went to its astrometry function, and changed the catalogue to USNO (and the path location). It then solved all my 2008 LG2 pictures within two minutes. Therefore, I am now able to get a fairly accurate value for the asteroid's position in my pictures. This issue had held me up for close to two weeks, so I am very happy to finally get it resolved and move on.

Day #20

Maxim DL is very frustrating. Like I said in my last post, it did finally give me the coordinates for my first telescope position. I have since tried many of the other positions with no success. It often takes over an hour to process the request before it tells me it was unable to match the stars. Sometimes, it never gives me any message. It just seems to freeze. What I'm left with is two sets of coordinates, one for my first position and one for my last. I guess if I had to pick any two, these would be them. I'm going to get out a ruler and try to find the other coordinates manually. I'll make a scale using the values I do have that will hopefully enable me to estimate the ones I don't have. This obviously won't be extremely accurate but I can think of no other method to turn to.

Day #19

Using Maxim DL, I was able to get the coordinates of my asteroid at its first telescope position with the "PinPoint astrometry" feature. This is encouraging because I had all but concluded that Maxim DL would only do this for the final position. However, it takes Maxim DL a very long time to do this. It must have worked for forty minutes searching through the star catalogue before it finally solved the image. I set it to work on the second position, but after about an hour, it still had not been able to work its astrometry. I left it going, so hopefully it will work at some point. If I can get it to work for all my telescope positions, then I'll have what I really need. This is what I'm currently working on. It is a very slow process.