开云体育

Who says you can't do interesting observations under a Full Moon...

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On September 12th Steve Conard (and possibly Roxanne) have a shot at this interesting rock (see Occult4 path). (Others NEUS observers have shots, but they would need to go mobile). It's technically classified as an "NEO/NEA" but it actually comes much closer to Mars. It's also a rock on the ACROSS team list.

The Sept 12 conditions are:?
Combined mag = 9.2 / Max Dur = 4.8 sec / Pred Mag Drop = 0.43 / Alt 54d / Moon 60%, 86d away

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Interestingly enough I was able to capture it on July 20th - the event being very similar to Sept 12th circumstances. My conditions were:
Combined mag = 10.2 / Max Dur = 4.6 sec / Pred Mag Drop = 0.38 / Alt 67d / Moon 98%, 77d away. (I got a duration of 4.50 sec and drop of 0.25 mag)

[I also got Pos events on July 21st, and 22nd - under the near-Full Moon].

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(1036) has a highly inclined orbit and it was nice going after a rock that was just exiting the dense starfield of CYGNUS! It was nearly overhead for my observation!

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It was captured with my 12-inch and using my Astrid (at 33fps - 0.00% timestamp error). Visually I could not see the drop on the computer monitor, but in the PyMovie/PyOTE analysis, the 0.25 mag drop I measured is unmistakable (and to the second of the prediction).

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I'll also mention an interesting aspect when I went to send Norm my report... For QHY camera events I was told to always send the .log file the camera produces (helps verify the timing was accurate...). In sending my report and using an Astrid I'm also attaching the .log file the Astrid produces. In this case, for this important rock, I recorded for 1.5 minutes on each side of the predicted center-time (running at 33fps). This produced an Astrid.log file of over 14Mb. Some ISP mail systems only still allow attachments up to 10Mb in size. My full report with all needed files was about 17Mb. I have brought this to the attention of Mark Simpson (Astrid) and Steve Preston.

? ? -G

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[Edited - corrected a typo on a date]

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