We’re virtually done with the astrometry on the asteroid 2005HN3. The poster of our research project has to be finished on Wednesday though, so we’re going to have to rush to be able to finish the photometry. I’m going to talk to my supervisor first thing in the morning to ask for his opinion as I have the feeling that we’ve been doing quite a lot of work already on the project.

Maybe we can reduce some of our initial goals for the project, I don’t know… We’ll see what he says. If not, I’m certainly going to ask him for some advice on how to do the photometry as quickly as possible, because I feel we won’t get ready on time if we do it the way we have been doing it up till now. It’s just not time efficient enough.

My main problem with reducing our goals however, is…

…that we don’t have a lot of exciting results up till now. We came very very close to the ephemeris with our measurements (0.15 arcseconds or less than half a pixel), so we have proven that with our limited measurements on a moonlight sky we can still get a reasonably accurate position measurement.

The process that got us there is also interesting (at least for astronomers ;)) so I’m sure we can put some of that in the poster. But aside from that… we can send the results to the MPC (Minor Planet Center) so that their orbit measurements can be refined, but there’s not much more I can put on the poster… :P… We’ll see what my supervisor says tomorrow. Maybe I’m just too ambitious :P.

In the picture above you can see our measurements (you better click on it to get a bigger version). The graph shows the difference between the calculated ephemeris and our measurements. The black dot in the middle shows the position of the asteroid at the calculated ephemeris, the crosses are our measurements and the other black dot shows the average of our measurements. You can see that we have a deviation away from the calculated position of about 0.15 arcseconds. This compares to a difference of 10 km at a distance of 0.09 AU or 13.5 million kilometers (8.4 million miles).

One thing is sure… If this is what being an astronomer is like, then I’m pretty sure I’ll like it ;). Studying isn’t really my thing, and I doubt it’ll ever be, so I’ll have to find ways to get myself through that, but messing around with these pictures and extracting useful data out of it with self-written programs… I like it :).