TDO Reaches 50 Asteroids
Sometimes the weather and the Moon don’t cooperate in our quest to measure faint NEO’s and provide useful data that can refine their orbits. Located in Southeastern United States, Transit Dream Observatory is subject to high humidity and often cloudy skies during the summer months. Even though TDO is in a rural area, the sky glow from water vapor in the air reduces how deep we can go. On those nights if conditions are good enough to image I’ll still attempt to capture some brighter asteroids, to perfect my methods and reliability in imaging and measuring.
Last night was one of those nights, with the moon being almost full. A list of 12 brighter asteroids was compiled to image. In most cases asteroids like these have well established orbits that need little or no refinement. Some technical difficulties with the equipment, and some user error in programming the software to automate the imaging did not allow me to get as far as I would have wanted. I use Ccd Commander to program the operation of the observatory and integrate the image list into the imaging paramters. A simple mistake in entering the start time in 12hr notation, instead of 24 hr. would have started the imaging operation at 10:15 a.m. had I not caught the error. This still caused a delay which prevented capturing some of the asteroids that were sinking in the west.
The weather also interrupted and ended the session early as clouds filled the sky. In all 4 asteroids were imaged and measured.
(00006) Hebe, (00030) Urania, (00387) Aquitania, and (00599) Luisa
This brings the total to 50 asteroids measured, with 199 measurements.
COD W33
CON Transit Dreams Oservatory, Campobello, SC 29322 [dwilde.tdo@gmail.com]
OBS D. Wilde
MEA D. Wilde
TEL 127mm F7.5 APO Refractor + CCD
ACK MPCReport file updated 2017.07.08 01:02:51
AC2 dwilde.tdo@gmail.com
NET UCAC-4
00006 C2017 07 08.19267 17 24 19.63 -05 23 10.6 8.7 R W33
00006 C2017 07 08.20010 17 24 19.17 -05 23 13.5 9.3 R W33
00030 C2017 07 08.12781 14 20 09.85 -16 35 46.6 11.8 R W33
00030 C2017 07 08.13527 14 20 09.98 -16 35 46.7 11.8 R W33
00030 C2017 07 08.14271 14 20 10.10 -16 35 46.8 11.8 R W33
00387 C2017 07 08.11031 13 24 49.46 +12 37 00.6 11.8 R W33
00387 C2017 07 08.11777 13 24 49.83 +12 36 54.9 11.8 R W33
00387 C2017 07 08.12522 13 24 50.18 +12 36 49.4 11.8 R W33
00599 C2017 07 08.16720 14 58 40.31 -27 49 58.2 12.5 R W33
00599 C2017 07 08.17462 14 58 40.23 -27 49 58.9 12.4 R W33
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