Asteroids and Variable Stars

[Christopher Curtis]

I'm having great fun (and a lot of intellectual challenge) using Tycho Tracker (There's a Telescope Live Tutorial). It's quite a thrill when it helps you find and identify asteroids moving across your image field, or when you manage to come up with a believable light curve for something variable. I've managed to do this with a few things that happen to be in one-clicks that I have grabbed, but these are structured for detailed images rather than for this purpose.

I suspect I am going to go down the rabbit hole of collecting my own images from home and maybe following a few interesting variables and asteroids (as I used to do years ago), but as you expand your observation sets into planetary and solar, I wonder if it might be possible or good to offer some one-click sets that would be good for notable variable stars, comets and asteroids. These usually don't need to be long exposure per frame, and in one filter, but you do need them to add up to a long enough sequence to be able to see the movement or magnitude variation. (even with gaps between exposures).

[ERNESTO GUIDO]

Hi Christopher, 

Tycho is outstanding software (for astrometry and photometry and beyond)! I had the pleasure of collaborating with Daniel, its developer, to introduce some features. IMHO this software is the greatest development at the software level for the world of astronomy in recent years.

If you search our archive we have a number of dataset on recent bright comets. For example recently I made this anmated gif of comet C/2023 E1 (ATLAS) using 3 different dataset imaged on 17 - 18 - 19 July 2023 via SPA1-CMOS telescope:

https://telescope.live/gallery/comet-c2023-e1-atlas-updated-gif-third-dataset

 

Clear Skies,

Ernesto