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View Full Version here: : Near Earth Asteroid 2009 FD - whilst you were sleeping!


Dennis
27-03-2009, 03:48 PM
Space, what a busy place! Whilst grabbing some 60 second exposures of Asteroid 2009 FD on its 1.6LD race-by-rendezvous with our Earth environment, I also recorded 3 even faster moving objects, their ghostly trails appearing as fleeting tracks on my CCD camera.

The “short dashes” are the path of Asteroid 2009 FD, each “dash” being a 60 second exposure. The longer trails are probably satellites, as their paths are “punctuated” by the download time of each frame. And I thought we lived in a quiet neighbourhood! I felt privileged to be outside watching all the early morning action, whilst all around me, everyone lay sound asleep.

Brisbane, Qld, Australia, 27th March 2009
01:41am to 02:17am AEST (UT+10)
Vixen ED102mm F9 refractor
SBIG ST7 CCD camera, 18x60 sec exposures

FOV 25’ 45” x 17’ 09” at an image scale of 2.02 arcsec/pixel

Cheers

Dennis

PS – I have an animation but I can’t upload it, as our desktop PC is dead and I’m working on a older laptop with a very limited set of software tools!:(

EDIT:
Hah – managed to navigate to our backups on the network storage drive and located my ftp application, installation instructions and upload instructions! Oh the joy of backups when your computer dies on you!

WARNING: 1.0MB file. 2009FD animation (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/uploads/NEO-2009-FD-Animation-Text-2.gif)

h0ughy
27-03-2009, 04:08 PM
confusing but great, pretty busy up there.

iceman
27-03-2009, 04:24 PM
Wow Dennis, that's very cool. Excellent effort and animation.

troypiggo
27-03-2009, 04:28 PM
The animation is much less confusing than the jpg. Really cool.

Am I right - when the slow asteroid is top left near the end of the animation, it looks like it's smashing into something. 2 bits come off in either direction?

Quark
27-03-2009, 04:53 PM
Hi Dennis,
Like the animation, looks like you need air, or should that be space, traffic control in your region.

Regards
Trevor

StephenM
27-03-2009, 04:55 PM
Great animation Dennis! Well done.

Cheers,
Stephen

deadsimple
27-03-2009, 05:50 PM
Love the animation, well done!

sheeny
27-03-2009, 06:36 PM
Very cool, Dennis!



It's a very interesting artifact!:shrug: I dunno though whether it's the tail end of a collision flash, but the "fragments" rapidly disappear. Maybe its a Pico or Femto lensing event!???:D:P

Al.

Dennis
27-03-2009, 07:15 PM
Hi Troy

That’s probably a cosmic ray strike on that one particular frame. As our main PC is currently being re-built, I have had to resort to using use some older software tools on an older PC, so I haven’t been able to clean up the images to remove these artifacts!

Cheers

Dennis

[1ponders]
27-03-2009, 08:05 PM
Dennis Simmons, Asteroid Hunter Extraordinaire!! You are the Man! Dennis. :bowdown:

Dennis
27-03-2009, 08:19 PM
Thanks for all your nice comments and feed back – they leave a nice glow after a hard nights work!:)

The (presumed) satellite trails had me floored when each image downloaded, taking approx 18 secs as it is the older parallel camera. I initially thought, “what the!!!!” , believing that the camera had developed a fault. I reckon the trails are too regular and parallel to be meteors?:shrug:

‘Twas almost a night that didn’t happen! Thin bands of cloud kept coming through, ruining 2 out of the 3 sequences I managed to grab. In the best sequence above, frame 12 is missing due cloud interruption.

Having an older PC with older apps was also quite frustrating, but hey, if these are my only worries in life, then I am a lucky man indeed!:)

Cheers

Dennis

Dennis
27-03-2009, 08:22 PM
You sir, are a cheeky man! Not to mention clever, to be even able to write that stuff!;):lol::whistle:

Cheers

Dennis

h0ughy
27-03-2009, 08:41 PM
Ah yes it take a cleverer man to touche like that:rofl::whistle: after hearing the story behind the image you sir are a living wonder:thumbsup:.

Excellent Stuff Dennis - hopefully it will inspire others to follow your lead:)

jjjnettie
27-03-2009, 09:52 PM
Dennis,
Amazing work as always.:)

DaveGee
30-03-2009, 10:42 AM
Hi Dennis, space is indeed a busy place, at least in the solar system and environs.

This thread is timely as there is exciting developments in the NEA watch network of observers brought about by the recent passage of 2009 DD45, a 40-60m rock that was only discovered on 27th February by Rob McNaught and passed us by on the 2nd March at an altitude of 63,000km above Tahiti.

The passage was observed by two Australian observers; Dave Herald of Canberra and Hristo Pavlov of Epping. Dave's video can be viewed here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKKgMDK7A4

Producing good astrometry for these fast moving (>100"/minute) is very difficult because there is not a good reliable way to tell the time of exposure of normal CCD images, accurate to 0.1 second, however these images were taken using intergrating video cameras (WAT-120N+s) in both cases AND each frame was time stamped with GPS Video Time Inserters (KIWI OSDs), accurate to 0.001seconds.

The upshot of all this is that VERY good astrometry of the asteroid was produced and submitted to the Minor Planet Centre (MPC). The MPC in turn couldn't handle the accuracy of the time base and had to change their procedures to properly record the astrometry submitted. The upshot of all this is that for very fast movers, video techniques will probably be the prefered method of observation.

Dave Herald and others are working with the MPC to produce a guide for future observations and it is all within the capability of the amateur astronomer. As soon as the guide is finalised and released, I'll post it here.

So, NEA observers wishing to contribute to the observing program should watch this space!:thumbsup:

theodog
30-03-2009, 08:49 PM
Just watched the animation Dennis,:eyepop:

Simply stunning.:thumbsup:

RobF
30-03-2009, 10:00 PM
Original, entertaining and informative Dennis.
Thanks for the effort.

:thumbsup:

Jen
03-04-2009, 11:51 PM
:thumbsup::thumbsup: Well done Dennis im loving the animation :)

Dennis
05-04-2009, 07:16 PM
Thanks to everyone for your nice words of appreciation, they are much valued. Now that our new computer has been commissioned and familiar software re-loaded, I began the hunt for these mysterious trails, assuming them to be satellites due to their parallel tracks and multiple paths recorded on the sub-frames.

Starry Night Pro Plus 6 suggested the following candidate geosynchronous Satellites for the trails in the composite image.

CIEL-2 The Canadian communications satellite Ciel-2 launched on 11th December 2008 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Proton-M carrier rocket.
http://www.cielsatellite.ca/satellites.html
http://balita.ph/2008/12/11/canadian-communication-satellite-ciel-2-placed-in-target-orbit/

NSS-9 Launched on February 12, 2009. NSS-9 at 183° East is a replacement satellite for NSS-5, featuring three C-band beams ideal for government users, broadcasters, carriers and the maritime industry.
http://www.newskies.com/nss9.htm

Echostar 1 An American geostationary communications spacecraft that was launched by a CZ-2E with EPKM upper stage rocket from Xichang Center in Sichuan province, PRC on 28th December 1995.
http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/online/sat_echostar_1.html
http://www.geo-orbit.org/westhemipgs/fecho1specp.html

Starry Night Pro Plus 6
Using Starry Night Pro Plus 6, I plotted the paths of the geosynchronous Satellites then overlaid the ST7 composite image which showed a remarkable correlation between the actual and predicted paths of these 3 geosynchronous satellites, although I had mysteriously missed a 4th, Express-MD1?

SkyTools 3 Pro
I then plotted the trail of 2009 FD using SkyTools 3 Pro and merging the composite ST7 image and the SkyTools screen capture revealed how remarkably accurate SkyTools 3 Pro was in plotting the predicted path of 2009 FD.

Finally, on a roll, I generated another animated gif which on the 1st pass, shows a label free animation of the satellite that more accurately depicts the dynamic nature of the event which then runs on into an animation including labels identifying the 3 satellites.

Updated Animation: WARNING 1.0MB: 2009 FD (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/uploads/NEO-2009-FD-Animation-Text-2.gif)

Cheers

Dennis

[1ponders]
06-04-2009, 06:49 AM
Blimey Dennis (English colloquialism ;) ), when are you going to start running a few classes on how you put all this together. I know I've sat with you a couple of times while you've outlined it, but a lot of its still double dutch to me. Boy you do a professional job of it. :bowdown:

iceman
06-04-2009, 06:52 AM
Brilliant, Dennis. The animation is awesome. Extremely well registered and the labels are great.

Dennis
07-04-2009, 08:42 AM
Thanks Paul and Mike, I appreciate your stopping by - again! LOL!

Paul, I suspect that to most casual viewers, the raw data of a few stars and a series of dashes may not look very interesting, so I’ve tried to dress it up with explanations about each element and of course, with the heroic exploits of the image taker!:whistle:

The main tool used to tart up the data was Adobe Photoshop CS3 which continues to amaze me more each day, as I become more familiar with its marvelous capabilities and rich tool set.

The Starry Night Pro Plus 6 overlay was done in SNP by importing the final composite image and then SNP has a set of easy to use tools that help you position and align the imported image as an overlay on the SNP star field. SNP was fabulous to use to plot the geosynchronous satellites, although I haven’t worked out yet how to label them in SNP – I added the labels in CS3.

SkyTools 3 Pro is an excellent application that probably would be the one that I would choose if I could only have one. The image overlay on the SkyTools field was done in CS3 using Layers. I really like the way that SkyTools plots the predicted path of these NEO’s, so I can then jump ahead and wait for the NEO to enter the FOV of the ST7.



Mike, I finally figured out how to do animations in CS3!:)

I created a background frame by combining all 18 sub frames using a Median combine to get rid of the trails of 2009 FD and the satellites, and then I used Layers to drop the dashed trail of 2009 FD and the satellites back into each frame, so the background was a little less noisy. I figured a smoother background should also reduce the file size, always a challenge with animations.

Cheers

Dennis