I am observing the asteroid 4628 Laplace, and want to show its motion across my 45' CCD frame in three days. The way I did this in SkySafari 5 was to search and center, and then de-select it by tapping on another star in the field, and running a time sequence. As long as I have "Show Asteroids" on and the magnitude limit faint enough, it would show the asteroid. With SkySafari 6, this particular asteroid will not display even with the magnitude set to Unlimited. I don't know if the asteroid is being confused with earth or moon features, but the same thing happens for 33002 Everest. It, too, will not display unless it's the selected object.
Obviously, this is not a deal-breaker for Skysafari, but I wondered if this can be addressed. Thanks.
Tom
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3 comments
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Bill Tschumy Tom,
I can reproduce this. Give us a day or so to look into what might be happening.
Bill
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Bill Tschumy Tom,
I talked with Tim about this. Independent of your magnitude settings, we only draw non-selected asteroids on screen if it is considered (by us) as a "major" asteroid.
Major asteroids either:
1: Have a number between 0 and 2000 (i.e. are one of the first 2000 discovered asteroids
2. Have an absolute magnitude < 10
3. Have a diameter > 10 Km
We have 700,000 asteroids in the Pro database. We just can't draw all 700,000 and expect any kind of reasonable performance. That is why we only draw major asteroid if they are not selected.
I haven't looked at the specifics of (4628) Laplace, but I suspect the absolute magnitude must be right on the edge of what we consider major. In SS5 we used both the Minor Planet Center and the Lowell asteroid database to generate our list of asteroids. In SS6 we only use Lowell. Perhaps Lowell's data is for absolute mag puts it just outside our major designation.
Hope that helps.
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Tom Polakis OK. Makes sense. Thanks.
Tom
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