Love Deep-sky annotation; A viewer asks... comets? Asteroids?

[EmeraldHills]

Hello Robin - and the group. Whenever I mention Sharpcap in one of my live-streams, it always generates deep respect. It's obvious, Robin, that you've generated a HUGE fan base. (I'm one of them.) In a recent video, I highlighted the new deep-sky annotation. Viewers LOVED it. Deep respect. One viewer then humbly requested, "Would Robin someday make it possible to annotate comets and asteroids??? : ) Something to pray about. : )

Thanks for all you do. You're essentially the reason electronically-assisted astronomy has grown the way it has!!!!

Doug
Emerald Hills Skies
www.EmeraldHillsSkies.com

[elythomaslumber]

Nice idea, I just have read the latest issue of the free MagPi (Raspberry Pi) magazine where you will find a good article about meteor detection.
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/

Regards,
Hardy

[procyon12]

Hi,

Using "Paste Custom Object Info" you can already add asteroids and comets. E.g., the asteroid (225059) 2007 HJ3 is currently in Orion. Copy this code

Code: Select all

(225059) 2007 HJ3||Asteroid|05h33m44.994s -05°09'41.66"||20.6||

to clipboard and paste it:

ast.png (490.9 KiB) Viewed 763 times

RA and DEC I got from CDC (MPC data), the nearby star in the above picture is UCAC4-425-010218, 9.9m.

However, asteroids and comets are very dynamical objects ... And the current MPC catalog lists 1,173,950 objects. For stellar asteroid occultation observers the inclusion of such objects in some form would be interesting.

Cheers, Christian

[admin]

Hi Doug,

welcome to the forums - it's great to hear that you are enjoying the image annotation feature and that your viewers love it too

Christian is absolutely right that you can paste in RA/Dec information for solar system object if you can get it from another source, which is one approach. If there is a commonly used source for this info that is in a format that isn't compatible with the format SharpCap expects then let me know and I will see if it is possible to add support for that format (for instance a different style of CSV).

I did start to investigate including solar system objects, with the idea of initially just having sun/moon/planets and then thinking about asteroids. I soon ended up going down a rabbit hole of different ways to calculate the positions of the planets, some simple but of limited accuracy and some good down to the arcsecond but of vast complexity. Now, with the 'big' solar system objects, a little error isn't the end of the world - you would easily spot Jupiter or Neptune even if it is not quite under the annotation mark for it. For asteroids, the target is just another faint dot amongst the stars and if the annotation isn't in the right place then it's probably useless

So, as Christian says, 1.1 million objects is a lot, and how much data needs to be known for each one to give a good, accurate position calculation? How often does that data need to be updated? It's all something that needs a lot of consideration, which is why that feature is still on the drawing board.

cheers,

Robin

[carlomuccini]

Hi all

As for asteroids, there are two ways

1. I know the asteroid, I want to film it but I also want to be sure that I am framing it and I want it in the center
or
2. I'm curious to know if there is an asteroid in the field of view

For the 1. it is easy because obviously I know the coordinates of the asteroid and I do GOTO
With Plate Solving, I center the exact point in the frame
I can enter the coordinates in SharpCap and view it

For the 2. instead you need to take a picture, feed it to ASTAP who will easily recognize ALL the objects in the field of view including asteroids.
It would be very hard and time consuming to calculate the REAL-TIME orbits and positions during shooting

Carlo