10th May 2011 Notes: Elenin Part 2 of 2

As we asked in Part 1, if you are looking at a picture of a star field and are asked to find a comet, how do you do that. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But there is a way.

We use planetarium software to match our picture to the stars but you can use detailed sky maps on the Internet to do your comet hunting. Keep in mind that these sky maps such as Google Sky or Worldwide Telescope or wikisky are not live views of the night sky…..but they will show you what stars you should see in your picture and you should be able to see any new arrival in the area.

For this post, we will use the star maps supplied by wikisky.org as it is freely available to everyone..

We know at the time of taking the picture of Elenin today that the comet was at the position of RA 10h 31m 54s  and  DEC  +7° 40′ 45″.

In wikisky, we enter the coordinates of RA 10h 31m 54s  and  DEC  +7° 40′ 45″ as       10 31 54 7 40 45   as shown in the picture below. Press the magnifying glass and the star map for the area Elenin is in will be displayed, with a white box around the area the comet is in.

Then we simply look on our picture for the stars shown in wikisky, then find the area shown by the white box…. and then we will find comet elenin as shown below.

In the picture below, we have marked a star with “A” in both pictures  to help you match the stars.

Note: if you look at the white square in the wikisky picture below left, you will see 2 diagonal stars. If you look at our picture in the middle, you will see these 2 stars just faintly at the 7 o’clock and 8’oclock position below comet elenin.

Elenin 10th May 2011 (Click to Enlarge)

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~ by sydneystargazers on May 10, 2011.