One day in the orbit of seven dwarf planets
Do you remember where or what you were doing last December 5-7?. While each of us live our day to day, there are thousands of small bodies beyond Neptune orbiting the sun tirelessly. This work is about seven of those dwarfs planets.
In the summer of 2012, we began to plan how to capture the maximum number of dwarf planets on two consecutive nights to detect their motion. To achieve this goal we needed very specific conditions that were only met some days ago:
1. New Moon was needed (because they are extremely faint objects).
2. We needed two consecutive good weather nights, because an isolated night would not allow us to record the TNOs movement with respect to the starry background.
3. The chosen nights should allow us to capture a sufficient amount of those objects.
4. It should be done in winter, when the nights last more than 12 hours. That would give us enough time to locate each object and have enough exposure time.
Only considering the Moon variable limited us to 12 opportunities throughout the year. Adding the other limitations did make it even more difficult to find the right time to do it.
On December 5th, we decided it was the right time to execute the project . After a careful selection of the available objects, we chose eight dwarf planets which were visible that night. At sunset we found Salacia in Pegasus. It was followed by Eris in Cetus and Sedna and Chaos in Taurus (although the latter was the only one that was not possible to image due to an error in the prediction of its position). At midnight we gotVaruna in Gemini, Orcus in Sextant, Makemake in Coma Berenices and nearly at dawn, we were able to capture Haumea in Bootes .
You can find the full story here:
http://laazotea.org/TNO_marathon
© 2013: Antonio Román & Zerjillo