ASTR 1010L & ASTR 1020L

ASTEROIDS

This is a difficult lab. The asteroids that we can find from the intramural fields are all in the 6-8 magnitude range and are usually in non-descript fields (i.e., no bright stars nearby). To positively identify the asteroid , you should see it move with respect to the background stars over the period of a week or two. This is not necessary to get full credit, but you do have to convince the instructor that you have found the asteroid in question rather than some arbitrary faint star. To do this, you will have to identify the asteroid from the finding chart on the next page (there are two asteroids that we can attempt in the Fall of 2008, Vesta and Metis; go for Vesta as it is the brighter of the two (you only need to find one to get full credit for this lab). If you want the exact coordinates for the object on a given date, then go to the website you used for the Uranus or Neptune lab:

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons

and follow the directions. You should see where the asteroid is on your Sky Atlas – the scale of each field is much bigger and you can get a better idea of the general area of the sky the asteroid is located in. Remember, this is a pretty hard lab, so if you haven’t mastered the easier labs, then you don’t really want to try this. The asteroids will just look like faint stars, so it’s not like Uranus where you can see a disk under high magnification. Good luck!