Nereid, mag 18.72 moon of Neptune from Brisbane, 27 Sept 2008

[astroron (Ron)]

Magnificent Dennis, your mag 20 imaging certainly puts my deep sky 14.6 mag visual observing to shame
I rearly enjoy your work
Ron

[Dennis]

Thanks Ron, it is quite pleasing to be able to share the results with friends and like minded souls.

It’s also good to see you back on line after your epic trip around Australia and your recovery holiday at the Barambah Astro camp!

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Hello,

Well, what a pleasant surprise! This morning the door bell rang and after confirming it wasn’t the bailiffs, I opened the door to be greeted by a package which I wasn’t expecting.

Lo and behold, winging its way all the way from Obi Obi care of Paul Russell (1Ponders) in my hands I had a book “Neptune: The planet, rings and satellites” by Ellis D. Miner and Randii R. Wessen (Published by Springer-Praxis).

Paul found the book in a used book store and very kindly purchased it and sent it to me as a gift – thanks Paul, you’re a champ.

My next photo will be of a Subaru Outback 3.0R Premium, so get scouring the car yards Paul!

Cheers

Dennis

[h0ughy (David)]

Originally Posted by Dennis

Hello,

Well, what a pleasant surprise! This morning the door bell rang and after confirming it wasn’t the bailiffs, I opened the door to be greeted by a package which I wasn’t expecting.

Lo and behold, winging its way all the way from Obi Obi care of Paul Russell (1Ponders) in my hands I had a book “Neptune: The planet, rings and satellites” by Ellis D. Miner and Randii R. Wessen (Published by Springer-Praxis).

Paul found the book in a used book store and very kindly purchased it and sent it to me as a gift – thanks Paul, you’re a champ.

My next photo will be of a Subaru Outback 3.0R Premium, so get scouring the car yards Paul!

Cheers

Dennis

top stuff Paul LOL best of luck Dennis

[Dennis]

Hello,

I decided to re-visit my series of Nereid images and plot the predicted path of Nereid in The Sky 6 Pro, using data generated by the NASA JPL HORIZONS on-line solar system data and ephemeris computation service.

Well, to my surprise, the path that I had previously thought to be that of Nereid was several arc minutes away from the HORIZONS data as plotted in The Sky Pro 6 as a manually generated User Defined Object based on RA and DEC coordinates.

After a bit of head scratching and digging deeper into my data, I finally discovered the real Nereid, precisely where the HORIZONS system predicted it would be. The other moving object in the frame turned out to be a Minor Planet, designation 5796 1978 VK5.

So, after much investigation and plotting, finally, here is the corrected version. It looks as if the focus changed during the 5 x 20 minute exposures spanning 8:07pm to 9:53pm on 27th September 2008 as the track of Nereid “blurs” in the latter frames (see in-line cropped and enlarged animation).

Nereid animation: WARNING: File size 1.6Mb

Cheers

Dennis