Lessons from Bohemia
Abstract
This paper presents a "true life adventure" into asteroid photometry methods, which hopefully will be encouraging and useful to other amateur astronomers who are doing asteroid photometry. The key themes are: (a) a densely- sampled light curve, and fine sampling of the Fourier analysis errors, are very valuable in establishing the asteroid's rotation period; (b) the reli- ability of the "Hardie method" of determining atmospheric extinction is im- proved by taking account of the colors of standard stars; and (c) determi- nation of asteroid absolute magnitude and "slope parameter" requires special efforts to achieve photometric accuracy of 0.03 magnitude or better.
- Publication:
-
Society for Astronomical Sciences Annual Symposium
- Pub Date:
- May 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004SASS...23..131B