Photometry of short period asteroids // Sky in July
2 July 2021 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm BST
Talk by Prof. Giles Hammond of the University of Glasgow
We will also have the Sky in July from Alan Pickup.
There are a large number of asteroids which are reasonably bright (>12th magnitude), have rotation periods of several hours and are easily observable from UK latitudes. As asteroids rotate, their magnitude is modulated, and accurate photometry can reveal these fast rotators.
In this talk, I will describe a project which was run with our 3rd/4th year undergraduates at the University of Glasgow during the COVID lockdown. Using a remote telescope in Spain, we took consecutive nights of data of a pair of asteroids. I will describe the work undertaken to calibrate the images using dark/flat/bias frames, the use of plate solving software to identify the asteroid, and how calibration stars were used to estimate the asteroid magnitude.
These techniques can be applied to any remote telescope data and can be expanded to variable stars and exoplanets.
ASE members will join on Zoom and visitors are welcome to watch live on our YouTube channel.