Back to Home

XEphem Forum Message

Forums: Atm · Astrophotography · Blackholes · Blackholes2 · CCD · Celestron · Domes · Education
Eyepieces · Meade · Misc. · God and Science · SETI · Software · UFO · XEphem
RSS Button

Home | Discussion Forums | XEphem Ephemeris Software Discussion | Post
Login

Be the first pioneers to continue the Astronomy Discussions at our new Astronomy meeting place...
The Space and Astronomy Agora
Searching Through Close Pairs Of Objects?

Forum List | Follow Ups | Post Message | Back to Thread Topics
Posted by Patrick Salsbury on November 25, 2000 21:00:34 UTC

Hi, all.

I'm starting to play with the asteroids databases, and want to see if I can spot any with my 8" Newtonian scope. I've started plotting trails on them with XEphem, and notice that most of them seem to really be moving quite fast, so I'm going to have to find ones that pass close to a fixed point that I can train my scope on.

My question is this: Is there a way of searching for closest pairs other than saving the list out to a text file and doing some sort of 'grep' on it? Specifically, I have a reasonable amount of sky overhead, but am surrounded by trees, so in many directions, I can't see below 30-40 degrees, and in one spot, the redwoods block out half the sky, up to probably about 70-85 degrees. (I did just discover the 'xephem_hzn' file functionality, so I'm going to survey my treeline to have XEphem plot out what I can actually see.)

So what I'd like to do is be able to say "I can see Deneb. I'd like to be able to search for any close pairs that come within X.Y degrees of separation from Deneb." (Or whatever stars I can see in my sky at that time.)

It currently seems like the close-pairs functions just do a bulk search and give a list, sorted by separation. It'd be nice to be able to refine that search by some known stars, and to sort it in different ways (name, magnitude, etc.) Also, perhaps a way of searching backward and forward in time, to say "what things will be passing close to Jupiter tonight, during this 6-hour window?"

Elwood, are there any plans to do things like this? Or should I be breaking out the source code and trying to figure it out myself? I realize that I could do this simply in the shell with the text file output, but I'm not sure how I'd go about finding things that pass close to a known star or other point (planets, etc.) other than a haphazzard stumbling across it by accident.

Is there some other functionality that I don't know about within XEphem that lets you search like this? How do the asteroid occultation people figure out what events are going to happen, other than a brute-force search?

Keep up the great work, Elwood! :-)

Pat

Follow Ups:

Login to Post
Additional Information
Google
 
Web www.astronomy.net
DayNightLine
About Astronomy Net | Advertise on Astronomy Net | Contact & Comments | Privacy Policy
Unless otherwise specified, web site content Copyright 1994-2024 John Huggins All Rights Reserved
Forum posts are Copyright their authors as specified in the heading above the post.
"dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET"
are trademarks of John Huggins