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Asteroid 2104 JO25

I just got around to seeing how SkySafari does with the prediction of the Near Earth Asteroid 2104 JO25.  The answer is pretty well.  I used the Minor Planet Center's ephemeris service to check the location around closest approach (I used April 19th at 6AM Mountain Daylight Time).  I got this comparison:

SkySafari:    RA: 15 41 00.2      Dec: 66 31 35.3

Minor Planet Center:    RA: 15 41 07.9      Dec: 66 34 31

This is very good agreement and will place the object within a high power 0.2º field of view  We are both predicting a mag 11.2 object at that time.  

This image shows a 1º field of view centered on the MPC's coordinates.  You can see the asteroid is very nearby.



I should point out that when you search for the asteroid you will get two entries for 2014 JO25.  The second one has the most recent orbital elements.  I'm not sure why the MPC has both.  If you look near the bottom of the object Info for whichever you select you can see the epoch of the elements.  Choose the one for this year.

9 comments

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    Alejandro Pelorosso

    Hi! I have Starry Night Pro 7 and I cannot find 2014 JO25, it just can't find it. How did you find it?

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    Bill Tschumy

    My posting was about SkySafari, not Starry Night.  However, I just fired up Starry Night and Typed "2014 JO25" (without the quotes) in the search field and it was found immediately.  

    You might bring up the Preferences and click the Startup tab.  My "Maximum asteroids to read..."  is 600.  You could try bumping it to 1000 if it is already at 600.  Then I think you might need to close the app and restart.

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    Keith Caceres

    Thanks for clarifying which of the two is most up to date. You sir are a steely-eyed missile man.

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    Adolfo Baltazar

    Well, I tried downloading the orbital elements from the MPC for my Starry Night 6 Plus but, or either I'm to dumb to work out the request page (most likely), or I'm not doing something right with the program. I got a "elements.txt" file and I copy it to the sky data folder and when I look for it on the "find" section, It does not come up. I tried typing just "2014" without the rest and nothing came up either. Can you please post the file so I can put it in the program. I got to this since the regular sat/asteroid update didn't contained this info. Thank you.

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    Bill Tschumy

    You shouldn't need to download anything manually.  Starry Night will pull the latest orbital elements on its own.

    Keiron, can you help Adolfo?

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    Adolfo Baltazar

    Well, I haven't been helped in this issue and the asteroid just flew by. I found the position for tonight's sighting  from  a free program: Stellarium

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    Bill Tschumy

    I apologize that Keiron didn't see this and respond.  He does the support for Starry Night while I do most for SkySafari.

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    Keiron Smith

    Sorry, Adolfo.  Thanks, Bill.  I created a ticket for Adolfo and reached out to him now.

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    Denis MORET

    Hello,

    On a french forum, we have some issues with this double entry of 2014 JO25 on different planetarium softwares. I made the same observation as Bill, and I found on another sky chart planétarium that the MPC entry ( http://mpcorb.klet.org/ ) was correct and that the other entry probably come from a harvard edu list and was outdated (  http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Unusual/Soft01Unusual.txt )

    One french user of SSP5 report he had only the bad entry in the search results ?

    And by the way, I made very nice observation of this astéroid thanks to skysafari.

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