August 6
Roger Dymock wrote a book about observing asteroids titled
Asteroids and Dwarf Planets and How to Observe Them that will be published by Springer in November 2010.
Roger uses SSON regularly for his asteroid and comet research. He lives in the UK and is one of
the many members of the British Astronomical Association who use SSON regularly for their projects.
Below is an image of the front cover page of the book, a press release blurb, and the table of contents of Roger's book.
We look forward to reading his book after publication. Congratulations Roger!
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Often called “the vermin of the sky,” asteroids roam our Solar System often unseen. Many have been tracked,
and their orbits and spin periods calculated. But there are still large numbers to be discovered and assessed.
Many amateur astronomers are helping in this effort, often working with professional astronomers, to
contribute to our knowledge and avert the possibility of an impact such as the one that probably accounted
for the dinosaurs. Some observers will just enjoy locating asteroids or the dwarf planets, such as Pluto, and
then following their paths. Others will wish to probe more deeply into their properties. Whatever your interest,
‘Asteroids and Dwarf Planets and How to Observe Them’ will help you get started. It will tell you what you are
ooking at and why you should look. It will also help you learn how to look. This is definitely an area where
amateurs can make a difference.
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Table of Contents
Part I: Asteroids and Dwarf Planets
Chapter 1: Introduction.
Chapter 2: Small (and Not So Small) Solar System Bodies.
Chapter 3: Groups and Families.
Chapter 4: The Nature of Asteroids and Dwarf Planets.
Chapter 5: Origins and Evolution.
Chapter 6: Impact?
Part II: Observing Guide
Chapter 7: Observatories.
Chapter 8: Visual Observing.
Chapter 9: Webcam and DSLR Imaging.
Chapter 10: Astrometry Tools and Techniques.
Chapter 11: Astrometry Projects.
Chapter 12: Lightcurve Photometry Tools and Techniques.
Chapter 13: Lightcurve Photometry Projects.
Chapter 14: Absolute Magnitude.
Chapter 15: Occultations.
Chapter 16: On-Line Image Analysis.
Chapter 17: A Final Word.
Appendices. A: Professional and Amateur Organizations
- B: Resources.
- C: A method for determining the V magnitude of asteroids from CCD images.
- D: Astrometry How-To.- Index.
July 23
The staff of the Sierra Stars Observatory in California will be on summer vacation next week
from Saturday July 24 through Monday August 2. The observatory will be closed during that time.
However, we will continue to accept your schedule requests, which we will start running again
on August 3. This period is between the full moon and the last quarter moon, when the skies
are fairly bright. We will be ready to run your schedules for the start of the next dark cycle.
In addition, the Grove Creek Observatory (GCO) facility is experiencing mechanical
technical difficulties that prevent the telescope system from acquiring the consistent
high quality data required by our customers. The staff at GCO is working on resolving
the issues. SSON does not control or own the equipment or facilities of our partners,
but we are responsible for ensuring that our customers receive high-quality data.
Therefore, schedule requests for GCO will not run until our testing shows the
equipment is ready to go back on line.
We thank you for your use and support of SSON!
July 13
We are in the process of moving our website to a new internet service provider. Please let us know if you find
anything not working correctly. Sorry for all the problems over the past month. We have had a horrible
experience with the service from our current (soon to be previous) ISP.
June 18
Starting today the Grove Creek Observatory (GCO) in Australia is available to SSON users for scheduling images.
We are proud to have this excellent facility as an SSON partner. Now you can image the entire sky using SSON!
We look forward to seeing some great images of Southern Hemisphere objects and the research work our users do
using the SSON/GCO telescope.
April 6
Sierra Stars Observatory Network is proud to announce our first observatory partner in the Southern Hemisphere –
The Grove Creek Observatory (GCO). Grove Creek Observatory is a professional research facility, run as a non-profit
organization. Grove Creek has a collection of remote controlled internet telescopes and CCD imaging systems.
The facility is very remote and far from any city lights, located 255kms by road (170kms direct), due west of Sydney,
in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. The nearest city is Bathurst, located 59kms North/East
and the observatory is 4kms west of the tiny village of Trunkey Creek (pop. 60 and hidden in a deep valley below
the observatory), at an altitude of 935 meters (3,068 feet) above sea level.
The observatory site is very dark with exceptional seeing. The limiting visual magnitude has been determined to be
7.37, the average background magnitude for a moonless night is 23.8, and the seeing is frequently one arc second or
less!
The observatory's core instrument is a 0.36-meter (14-inch) Celestron C14 Schmidt-Cassegrain optical tube assembly
with a focal length of 2,200mm (F/6.18) mounted on an Astrophysics GTO 1200 mount. The C14 OTA was built in 1971
and was the second model made by the "Celestron Pacific" telescope company. The optics are exceptionally high
quality tested to a combined performance of greater the 1/10 wavelength rms.
The Astrophysics GTO 1200 mount provides excellent mechanical pointing and tracking, which is further refined with
software calibration and modeling technology.
The primary imaging instrument is a SBIG ST8XME CCD camera with a Class 1 Kodak KAF-1603 chip. The un-binned pixel
resolution of the GCO telescope with this camera is 0.844 arc-seconds per pixel. The data for SSON are binned 2x2
to give a 1.69 arc-second per pixel resolution. The resulting field of view on this system is 14.3 arc-minutes
(high) by 21.5 arc-minutes (wide).
The GCO telescope currently provides seven Astronomik filters:
• Clear (no filter)
• Red
• Green
• Blue
• H-Alpha (Ha)
• Oxygen (OIII)
• Sulfur (SII)
For more information about specifications refer to:
GCO Description and Specifications.
March 5
We made some changes to the SSON online scheduling form that enable our users to do faster, more refined searching and sorting
of objects in all the online onject catalogs. Check it out:
SSON Object Catalog.
March 4
Martin Nicholson published a paper titled "Asteroid Astrometry using the Lowell Observatory Hierarchical Observation Protocol(HOP)"
online on Philica
(www.philica.com/display_article).
Martin used credits allocated to him through an SSON Grant. Dr. Robert Mutel, an astronomer at the University of Iowa and a member
of the SSON Grant Review Board, was an advisor for Martin's project. Martin is a long-time SSON user who does regular photometry and astromerty work.
December 26
SSON is proud to announce that our users can now have their FITS image files automatically
sent to their Photometrica account directories. The SSON development team worked with the
Photometrica developers to automate this process. Photometrica is an excellent online
program for doing photometry analysis of your FITS image data. To find out more information
about Photometrica check out their web site:
www.photometrica.org.
Our users can read how
to have their SSON image data automatically sent to their Photometrica account at this link
on our web site:
www.sierrastars.com/gp/WhatIsPhotometrica.aspx.
November 21
We received the message below from Bill Dillon about a Hilda asteroid discovery that
he and Don Wells discovered using SSON. Hilda asteroids are more rare than the Trojan
asteroids that Bill and Don recently discovered using SSON. These are very interesting
asteroids, which you can read about in the link in Bill’s message.
Congrats to Bill and Don on this exciting new discovery!
Hi Rich,
This dark moon's distant discovery (a=3.9 AU) was not a Trojan, but a Hilda
(in a 3:2 mean motion resonance with Jupiter)! This is a rarer bird than a Trojan. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_asteroid
And it has gone to 4 oppositions! And it's ours!!!
First hit was in 2001. Looks like all the previous hits have been fragmentary.
Spacewatch got it this October and November, but on single nights. Our pair of
nights + Spacewatch must have started the link cascade.
I love it!
News.htm
--Bill
October 12
Sierra Stars Observatory Network is proud to announce our collaboration with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC). IASC is an astronomy educational outreach program for high schools and colleges around the world. The primary mission of the project to date is to have students analyze and interpret image data from a 32-inch (0.81-meter) telescope at the Astronomical Research Observatory (ARO) located in Charleston, Illinois. ARO’s mission is to do follow-up work on Near Earth Objects (NEOs) and had the highest number of such observations (11,593) of any observatory in 2008.
The IASC students work with the ARO image data and look for incidental (non-NEO) asteroids that might be in the images to discover new asteroids. The problem they have realized is that the Minor Planet Center (MPC) requires a minimum of two astrometric position measurements on each of two or more nights. Single night observations may be submitted to the MPC, but in these cases the submitters do not get credit for any new asteroid designations/discoveries. Because the ARO’s job is to do follow-up observations of NEOs, they seldom cover the fields where any incidentally discovered non-NEO asteroid are located on succeeding nights. Therefore, IASC will now do follow up work using SSON telescopes to take images of asteroid discovery candidates detected from ARO data. IASC will also start using SSON as a primary asteroid discovery tool and do subsequent follow up work using the SSON telescopes. To read more about the IASC project go to their web site: http://iasc.hsutx.edu/index.htm.
We are proud to be part of the IASC project and to work with many students from other colleges and institutions who use SSON for interesting and productive scientific work.
Those of you who are doing asteroid discovery work should join the SSON Google group (http://groups.google.com/group/sierra-stars-observatory). The newsgroup is the place where we announce MPC designations and other information from the MPC for the SSO and Rigel MPC observatory codes. It is also a good place for people to get together and talk about collaborations on projects or just exchanging ideas.
September 23
Roger Dymock, Web Site Manager of the Asteroids and Remote Planets Section of the British Astronomical Association (BAA), published a paper on light curve work on Asteroid (01909) Alehkin from observations using the Sierra Stars Observatory. Roger’s paper is included in the latest Minor Planet Bulletin (P182) at http://www.minorplanetobserver.com/mpb/MPB36-4.pdf
Roger is currently scheduling observations for photometry light curves on two more asteroids. Obviously he is very enthusiastic about doing work on asteroids and he told me he hope it will inspire other SSON users to do some serious scientific work and write up their results. Having your results published in a professional peer-reviewed science journal is rewarding and contributes valuable scientific data to the astronomical community. There is a wealth of information about observing asteroids at the BAA Asteroid and Remote Planets Section web site:
http://www.britastro.org/asteroids/
Several other SSON users continue to do great asteroid discovery and follow-up work. The results are quite impressive. Since January 2008 SSON users have generated 140 asteroid discovery designations with the Minor Planet Center (MPC) for SSO (MPC observatory code – G68).
Congratulations to all the SSON users doing such great scientific work!
August 30
Rich Williams will participate in a 90-minute panel discussion at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) annual
meeting at Millbrae, California on Wednesday September 16 from 1:30PM to 3:00PM. The title of the panel discussion is
“Remote Data Acquisition and Issues for Research and Educational Use by Students, Teachers, and Amateur Astronomers”
The panel members are leading technical experts in the development and operation of non-profit and commercial remote
observatories. The following people are on the panel discussion group:
Bob Denny (ASCOM), Mary Dussault (Harvard Micro Observatory), Gary Fujihara (U Hawaii-Faulkes Telescope), Paul Hardersen
(North Dakota Space Grant), Rob Hollow (Australia National Telescope Facility), Rick Kang (Pine Mtn. Obs.), Kevin McLin
(Global Telescope Network), Madeleine Needles (MIT-Haystack Obs.), Mathew Marulla (Slooh.Com), Carl Pennypacker (Hands On
Universe), Steve Pompea (NOAO), Jordan Raddick (SDSS), Frank Summers (STScI), and Rich Williams (Sierra Stars Obs.
Network)
Carl Pennypacker from UC Berkley will give the introductory keynote speech “Why Do We Take/Provide/Use Digital Images?”
and Rich Williams will present a brief overview of what transpires during a remote imaging session. Then the panel will
discuss the following topics:
A. How has the technology evolved and changed over the past five years?
B. What are your current major success stories furnishing and using digital images? How do you measure success?
C. What are your current major issues and challenges using and providing digital images?
D. What do you envision in the next five years in terms of what you want and what will actually happen with digital
imaging access, technology, and uses? What collaborations might help?
Rich plans to record the session and post the recording as a podcast on the SSON web site.
Note: that the Sierra Stars Observatory will not be available for scheduling jobs from September 15-18 while Rich on the
road participating in the ASP panel discussion.
August 16
The FLI 09000 CCD camera for our 0.61-meter telescope in California has been
upgraded to implement the Residual Bulk Image flush (RBIFlush) routine offered
by
Finger Lakes Instrumentation (FLI).
This is a powerful and very effective
feature of FLI cameras that completely eliminates the affects of RBI
(persistent ghost image aftereffect) inherent to the new large format
Kodak front-illuminated CCD chips.
The upgrade required a firmware
replacement by FLI and the software development to integrate it into
SSON was done by Steve Ohmert.
The testing we have done and the feedback from our customers demonstrates
that this new system works very well.
August 8
Fabrizio Tozzi, a regular SSON user and a SSON Grant recipient, submitted a proposal
to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) to name an asteroid he discovered – Sierrastars!
His provisional designation of the asteroid was 2008 SW2, which was subsequently
assigned an official MPC number of 202806. After its being officially numbered Fabrizio
applied to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to have the asteroid named
Sierrastars after the Sierra Stars Observatory. Fabrizio just informed us that the
name was accepted and
is now officially named.
We truly appreciate this great compliment from Fabrizio and wish him more great
success in the future!