I would also add my heartiest congratulations to Dave on this wonderful discovery. As Dave is away at his press conference, I'll give you the gist of how it happened.

2008TM9 was fist recorded on Tuesday night. A moving object detected on a sequence of survey images did not correlate to any known asteroid. In fact it was just one of three objects which were unidentified and recorded at Celbridge and Raheny observatories. Two of the objects recorded at Raheny were subsequently identified as asteroids discovered as early as a week ago by the LINEAR sky survey.

Anyway the object recorded at Celbridge by DaveMc remained unidentified. A second night of observations were carried out Before submitted to the minor planet centre, the observations were double/triple/quadruple checked by Dave/Andreas Doppler/myself and then sent to the MPC. I don't know who was more nervous while waiting for the response, as usual Dave was the calmest of all. There was lots of finger nail biting and praying going on. The fear is always that the MPC have observations in their database which they have not processed and will always issue a discovery to the earlier observer.

There wasn't long to wait until Tim Spahr at the MPC confirmed that the object Dave designated as DMCD001 was now officially K08T09M or more commonly 2008 TM9. After the yelling and screaming had died down the realisation sunk in that Dave had just discovered the first asteroid from these shores since Andrew Graham discovered (9) Metis in 1848. 160 years is a long time to wait but I'm sure Dave will agree that it was worth the wait.

You can expect to see further discoveries from these shores in the not too distant future but for the moment I'm sure everyone will agree that if anyone in Ireland deserves this then its Dave, a tireless astrometrist and a great guy allround.

Great photos Martin.  You should try and get to the Galway airshow (if they ever run it again).  One of the best airshows in the country.

Very nice photos John, now you've hit on my other passion (when I'm not doing astronomy) .  Warbirds

Here's some photos of a trip to RAF Hendon with some of the guys from the online virtual No.56 (Firebirds) RAF squadron which I belong to.

http://firebirds.2ndtaf.org.uk/newsite/gallery/1-Hendon

All photos by yours truly (expect the ones I'm in of course).  Canon 300D modified (but with X-Nite CC1 filter).

Very nice shots ineed Andy.  Some lovely detail in there.   Noel Carboni's tools are just great.

No need to go anylonger than 4-5 minutes anyway.  One thing I've learned is that signal/noise is far more related to the total exposure time rather than individual subframes.  Are these just single frames or stacked?

I'm not totally convinced that we would not see at least the start of the fireball, or at least a rapid brightening as this little rock meets the tenuous upper atmosphere.

The latest observation (from 00:24BST) shows it now measured at Mag +14.5


In 24 minutes it has brightened from Mag 16 to mag 14.5!

Oh why couldn't it be clear tonight 

Guys if anyone has a clear sky right now you may be at least able to image this.  According to the latest available orbital elements (and new ones are coming in about every 20 minutes at present) this object is at about mag 15 just above the circlet of pisces.  See the following diagram;



This would easily be in range of a DSLR or CCD.   It will brighten rapidly, at 02:00UT it should still be visible at around mag 13.6;

I do warn that due to the obvious nature of this object, it is being highly perturbed by Earth and the uncertainty of the orbital elements remains high.

So it you have a clear sky (and maybe some in the north east do) go out and try and image this right now.

Thanks guys.  Yes it certainly was great fun, especially catching up with the guys and getting the chance to have a good old chinwag.  Nothing us astronomers like more that a good ol' natter and I can tell you if yakking was an olympic sport, the guys there would sweep the boards!!  The crew and other attendees are great fun too.  Guys like Pete, Damian, Bruce to name just a few are always up for a laugh.  On one past occassion I referred to Bruce Kingsley as 'Ben' Kingsley, so the name sort of stuck and I think forever more I'll be calling him Ben.

The S@N crew are also great crack and of course Sir Patrick despite his mobility difficulties is still as sharp as ever and always willing to join in the fun.  The nice thing about Patrick is he finds time for everyone.  We stayed the two nights at Patricks house and his hospitality was immense.  He has a rule he calls his 'Ironmonger' rule.  What it means is, if your glass is empty then its your fault, and if his glass is empty its also your fault!  We had a nice couple of hours when we arrived on the Friday night in Patrick's study and also a few drinkies after most of the folks attending the star party had gone home. Patrick will be perfectly happy sitting up having a drinkie and telling stories until the last man drops.

Like Carl I was very pleased to see the show broadcast.  It's a bit strange watching the sky at night when you end up watching yourself!

Anyway thanks for the good wishes.

You guys produce such lovely photos I'm not in the least bit surprised that they appear so frequently on the beebs website.

Congrats Paul.

As carl mentioned a full report to come, however in the meantime heres a photo of a sundog over Sir Patrick's house.



Big Dipper,

The Guy standing next to Gary is called Max, hes a photographer wih he 'Sky a Night' magazine.

Pete is he guy in his photo talking to Dr.Chris Lintott;

# 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3WijG4ggk

If you call 3 minutes hard work    Maybe for Carl it might be 

I was just doing something tonight and got fed up calculating these values with a calculator so I wrote a little program to do it.

http://www.webtreatz.com/resources/FieldOfView.exe

Save it to disk and run it.  You enter the pixelsize and the number of pixels wide/high of your CCD and the focal length of your telescope and it will tell you the Field of View of the combination and the all important 'Arcseonds Per Pixel' value.


(If it doesn't run on your computer, you would need to install the microsoft .net framework.)

Thats all it does just nice and simple.

Paul,

If you want to send me one the original unprocessed frame, I'd be happy to do a photometric analysis.

I particularly love the shot with M45.  Very atmospheric and two great shots.

That has to be the worst image I have ever seen. Was your scope underwater at the time?




 

Lovely job mate, fantastic image .10/10