How Important is it to Avoid Using NASA Data?

Jesus Christ you are pathetic. It's only my opinion.

Please kiss his back end some more.

I can't reply to you since i am now banned

how important is it to make sure you are not a shill?

Good. Your input is about as valuable as what I flushed this morning.

Right now I'm in the process of finishing up a program for tracking objects in space directly based on their orbits. It's a general solution for tracking everything from comets to asteroids to high altitude satellites or even probes headed out of the earth-moon system.

Whereas most planetarium programs and software will control a telescope and allow it to slew to the position of one of these objects, very few (generally high end expensive programs) allow for direct continuous tracking of the object. Most will simply stop once the telescope reaches the object, and unless the telescope has a built-in capability to track directly on its own, the object will slowly drift out of the eyepiece or smear across long exposure photographs. If the object is bright enough (like a bright comet) you can autoguide directly on it with a second camera and guidescope, but for dimmer comets, asteroids and space debris/satellites, this is not a viable option. Older telescopes like my LX200 classic do not have any built-in option to track continuously on moving solar system. Even newer but basic consumer grade GOTO mounts often lack this functionality.

It's the difference between this image of a comet whose motion has smeared the image:
:ison92813:
And this image tracking directly on the comet:
:isoncomposite:

This program will take an ephemeris file, a list of coordinates of the object from your location indexed by time, and feed the coordinates to the telescope in a continuous stream of data so that it tracks directly on the object for minutes or even hours if desired, for as long as the ephemeris file goes.

For now though, I want to know what people think about distancing the program from any reliance on NASA data. To save processing overhead and to ensure that the tracking is accurate and accounts for the gravity of the earth, moon, and planets (important for accurately tracking near earth objects over the course of a night), the ephemeris file will be generated by a second program before the tracking begins.

The two options I'm looking at are JPL HORIZONS or FindOrb. JPL HORIZONS is basically the gold standard in ephemeris accuracy ( [link to ssd.jpl.nasa.gov] ). It's used by professionals for highly accurate calculations of where solar system objects will be, and it has the advantage of being able to express coordinates at the equinox of date (accounting for precession). FindOrb is a free and open source program for calculating the orbits of objects in space. You feed it astrometric data, it gives you the orbital solution. It can also produce highly accurate ephemeris that account for the gravity of the planets, but it will only give you J2000.0 coordinates as an output. Older telescopes like mine do not precess coordinates during run time, only at startup (for the stars, moons and planets in its internal database), so any user-supplied coordinates (including those being received from a separate computer and program) must be given at the equinox of date. That means the program will need to calculate for precession in real time as it tells the telescope where to point, increasing processor overhead.

Basically, it's a lot more work and slightly less efficient as a route to avoid using NASA data altogether, but if the general sentiment is that this is an important thing to do, I'll do it. I certainly don't want to finish this program only to find out all the results it generates will be ignored because it relies on NASA as a data source. By relying on FindOrb the user can determine what data is included or excluded in calculating the orbit and the resulting ephemeris file. In fact you could then choose to use amateur data alone to the exclusion of all professional data if you so desire. What do you guys think?

So your writing a program that you can get by buying a real telescope. Good god Astro, man up and buy a real telescope already. Your child's toy was old when you got your hands on it.

This is a great listen.

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

MAJOR......FRICKIN.......ENVY

What a gift given you, the only thiing I can thnk of I would have rather expirenced...is being there onboard. Lucky you man.

for tracking objects, id just do some openCV magic and there you go.
but knowing little to nothing about auto-following telescopes i probably misunderstood something?
Letting the telescope follow a precalculated path should be even easier and trivial shouldn't it?

Excuse me? I have a real telescope. A "child's toy" cannot do this:
:omeganeb:
:cometlovejoy:
:ngc253:
I'm adding functionality to my very real telescope. K, thanks, bye.

I'm not a programming expert, as I said. I'm much better at astronomy than I am programming. It's not that the program itself is terribly complex, if it was I'd have to spend a lot more time studying programming, but it does need to calculate for precession in realtime, not just read off the precalculated values. It's something I know how to do by hand or by spreadsheet, I'm just adapting those calculations now into program form.

Uh, yes they can. My boy (14) can do everything you can do plus some by plugging his lx600 10 inch into his laptop. It called like autostar and tracerx or something. We've had this convo before and I've posted pics to prove it before. You said something along the lines of "must be nice to be able to buy a 4000 dollar telescope for your kid." I said, "yes it is" and a shit ton of people commented. Was a while ago now.

You should be fishing and watching delta launches, saving your cash for a real telescope.

only because you can afford a 4000$+ telescope for your kid that doesn't make it a child's toy :)

Uh, yes they can. My boy (14) can do everything you can do plus some by plugging his lx600 10 inch into his laptop. It called like autostar and tracerx or something. We've had this convo before and I've posted pics to prove it before. You said something along the lines of "must be nice to be able to buy a 4000 dollar telescope for your kid." I said, "yes it is" and a shit ton of people commented. Was a while ago now.

You should be fishing and watching delta launches, saving your cash for a real telescope.

showing my ignorance here... why does it have to be in real time?

And then, you should take a look at openCV library, it's really well documented and with lots of examples online.
I can imagine it being really useful, like when you find this amazing super rare comet - focus, and when in center press the magic button - the app does the rest :)

I have a real telescope, thanks. Let's see your 14 year old's deep space astrophotography (nevermind writing custom software for direct tracking of comets and asteroids).

Considering it's so easy to use a child can do it... An adult with a proper education in astronomy doesn't use a Meade, an amateur does. Said adult gets time at a planetarium or radio telescope, etc.

Astro is the kind of guy I see when I take my boy to a "star party" and tries to make friends with me or my boy because of his telescope.

I personally think NASA is a good choice.

Too many amateurs and pros are busy trying to make a name for themselves and prove NASA wrong...

So NASA has to be atop of the game.

Yes, and combine that with the endless "it's all a hoax, the World is flat!" crowd and you've got to do everything to a platinum level standard.