Saturday, March 28, 2009
LinkI was inspired by Fabio Plocostomos and Chris Go's work on Ceres at high res and decided to go for it myself near opposition or good seeing. So that single 2 day break in rain and clouds a week ago yielded some good Venus and Saturn images and also this great view of Ceres.
I had a hard time finding some good ephemeris data for angular size so calculated it myself as follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter
δ = d / D, where δ is the angular size, d is visual diameter and D is the distance to the object.
So using the WRONG units I get:
1.64AU distance to Ceres and 950km diameter of Ceres gives 0.798".
I hope to not have overexposed the object which would have caused bloat or bloom in the data. I stretched in post processing and resized to 200%
Enjoy!
Mike












