Re: [find_orb] Re: {MPML} Orbit determination exercise + SkyMorph image artifact ?

Bill J Gray Jan 30, 2011

Hi Alessandro,

> When I submitted this report to FIND_ORB and after pressing the
> autosolve button, I got what you would say is an even more weird orbit:

Both this orbit, and the previous ones, definitely fit into the
"zebras" category; i.e., they would be very unusual objects if real.

> I am surprised to see that in the images labeled:
> 2002-12-14 10:23:52
> 2002-12-14 10:39:07
> 2002-12-14 10:53:56
>
> ... and in the previous images, the triplet image shows what seems a
> moving dot (blue, green and red)! But this moving dot is shown twice:
> two blue, two green ... two red !
>
> Are these image artifacts ?

Um. I'd have to leave that to someone who knows more about SkyMorph
than I do. But I'd definitely say that the odds of being able to do
a precovery on an object with this short an arc are just about zero.
Essentially, by the time you get back to 2002, the possible locations
of an object, based on those three positions, would be "somewhere in
the sky; could be anywhere." In fact, if you tried to find it _now_,
a mere 20 days after the observations, the uncertainty area would be
enormous.

-- Bill