Good Monday afternoon here.
No rocks falling through the roof, no tidal waves from large impactors, only
bomb scares in San Francisco, and money being spent on recovery from
man-made destruction.
How do you see something that is moving against a background that is
relatively stable? Snap a picture, snap a a picture, align on key point,
substract, what is left has moved relative to key point.
Fix on another key point, snap a picture, snap a picture, subtract, what is
left has moved relative to the key point.
Put together a series of these results and see if what remained paints a
trail. Might be an asteroid if your picture is in the electromagnetic
spectrum of reflected light from such objects.
(if you did this with other electromagnetic signatures you might belong to a
SETI group. :-)
If you are a Frog sitting on a Lily Pad, it might be a fly, just another
potential meal.
If you are human looking into the sky, it might be something worth tracking,
especially if the track is aimed at you and the object is bigger than a
football field.
Maybe I need to learn how to look up - BETTER. - LRK -
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http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/tools.html
JPL's Solar System Dynamics Group have provided the following software tools
for the sky observer:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/
* Ephemeris Generator for all bodies in the solar system including comets
and asteroids.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.html
* Small Body Orbital Elements provides the orbital elements for numbered
asteroids, unnumbered asteroids and comets.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sb_elem.html
* Object Identification - Given a date, location and region of sky, find all
comets and asteroids matching the constraints within the region.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/sb_search
* What's Observable Tonight? - Given an observation date, location and other
constraints, find all asteroids and comets that are observable on that
night.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/what_obs
* Finding Pre-discovery Observations With SkyMorph
http://skys.gsfc.nasa.gov/skymorph/skymorph.html
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Larry
http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
