Astroblog: When Comet Al tells you it's in Pisces, its in Pisces

Monday, March 23, 2009

When Comet Al tells you it's in Pisces, its in Pisces

I was wrong, Comet Al was right. The field of views of the H1A imager during its rolled configuration WAS in Pisces. Rainer Kracht has identified my two probables in H1 as 234 Barbara (at mag 13.2 possibly a record for detecting faint objects in STEREO) and 128 Nemesis. The H1B field is in Capricorn/Aquarius. I haven't identified my unknown candidates yet, but I have eliminated 93 Minerva, 20 Marisalia, Neptune and 89 Julia (and 19 Fortuna). ~~So far I have no further candidates, but I would be surprised if it turned out to be an unknown. Still, I'll do some more looking tomorrow.~~
The bright object is almost certainly 324 Bamberga (Mag 11.0) and the dim object is almost certainly 19 Fortuna (Mag 11.7). So, no L4 or L5 asteroids.

As well, I'm now alpha tested of some cool sky mapping software, I'll tell you about this later.

Labels: asteroids, Stereo Satellite

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 10:36 pm

Comments:

The FESTIVAL software uses VSO as it's data source and they have not updated since March 2nd. I am manually downloading data from another source, but this has made things rather difficult.

Anyway, it looks like STEREO A rotated during this maneuver so that ecliptic north is now at the bottom of the images.

Mars seems to be centered in the HI2 images, so that can be used as a reference location. However, since everything has been inverted, it has made navigation rather interesting.

# posted by