Astroblog: Adding asteroid 2009 FH to Celestia and Stellarium

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Adding asteroid 2009 FH to Celestia and Stellarium

After the excitement of 2009 DD45, we have another approximately house-sized small body 2009 FH zooming by at nearly the same distance. We will not see it from Australia, and it's a bit of a challenge in the US too.

So for your vicarious enjoyment I've made up a Stellarium add-on and a Celestia .ssc file.

For Stellarium, you have to add the asteroid details to the ssystem.ini file in the data folder (always make a backup of this file okay). Just copy and paste the section below at the end of the system.ini file. When you run Stellarium, you will have to turn planet hints on in the configuration menu if they are not already on. For Celestia the .ssc file goes into the extras folder.

Here the 2009 FH files, data taken from the MPC. If you are unsure of where 2009 FH is use the search function, you have to type in 2009FH for the search to work.

[2009FH]
name = 2009FH
parent = Sun
radius = 0.03
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 0.423
lighting = true
sidereal_period =
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_Epoch = 2455000.5
orbit_MeanAnomaly = 39.79214
orbit_SemiMajorAxis = 1.4716363
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.3372367
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 24.02755
orbit_AscendingNode = 176.54108
orbit_Inclination = 0.67849

======= 8< cut here 2009FH.ssc 8< ==========================
"2009FH" "Sol"
{
Class "asteroid"
Mesh "ky26.cmod"
Texture "asteroid.jpg"
Radius 0.015 # maximum semi-axis about 20-30 meters
MeshCenter [ -0.000718 -0.000099 0.000556 ]

InfoURL "http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news161.html"

EllipticalOrbit
{
Epoch 2455000.5 # 2009 June 18.0 00:00UT
Period 1.79
SemiMajorAxis 1.4716363
Eccentricity 0.3372367
Inclination 0.67849
AscendingNode 176.54108
ArgOfPericenter 24.02755
MeanAnomaly 39.79214
}

RotationPeriod 0.178

Albedo 0.15

}
=========== 8 < cut here 8< =============================

Labels: asteroids, celestia, stellarium