Ephemerides and observability details for Great Shefford
Observatory Minor Planet Discoveries
This page links directly to the Minor Planet Center's Ephemeris Service to
provide up to date positions of all the objects listed below, to aid observers
in getting astrometric positions of the objects that have been discovered at
Great Shefford. See also the Discovery Circumstances
page.
Other observers also have their own follow-up pages, check out
this list
of links.
See a similar
page by Juan Lacruz (La Cañada, J87)
generated from MPC DISCSTATUS reports for selected observatories, including
Great Shefford, J95.
Discovery circumstances (in order of discovery) can be found here.
Objects are listed in order of increasing distance east of
the Sun (i.e. from evening sky objects through to morning objects) and
currently observable objects (near opposition) will generally be found near the middle of
the listing.
Information compiled [RunDate] from MPC MPES Ephemeris Summary and
1-line orbital elements.
Opposition dates, RA, Decl., Magnitudes and Elongations are approximate. One year and five year
Observability Charts are courtesy of Lowell Observatory but may not
be available yet for the most recently discovered objects, or reflect
changes due to very recently reported observations.
By default, ephemerides are topocentric for Great Shefford, begin now and are for 12 hours at 1
hour intervals and suppress output when the object is unobservable.
Start date for ephemerides: Number of dates to output
Ephemeris interval: Ephemeris
units: days hours minutes seconds
For daily ephemerides, enter desired offset from 0h UT: hours
If you select 8-line MPC format, you may display the residual block for the
objects selected:
Show residuals blocks. Show only residual lines containing observations from code .
If you select 8-line MPC format the elements will be displayed with the ephemerides.
If you select any format other than 8-line MPC format, only the elements are returned.
In such cases your browser should download the elements file and save it
to your local disk.
The summary lists the current J2000.0 coordinates, visual magnitude and
solar elongation of the selected minor planets, as well as information on
the date of last observation (where available), forthcoming opposition
data and details on the latest published orbit. The opposition data lists
the date of the next opposition and the declination and visual magnitude
at that time.
The list of available formats for the orbital elements was correct at the
time this document was prepared. It is possible that the Minor Planet
Center now supports futher formats. If you select the summary option,
any newly supported formats will be listed.
Elements
The elements supplied are the latest published elements for the
specified objects. Elements will be found even if the designation you
enter is a non-principal designation in an identification or if the object
has been numbered.
Ephemerides can be supplied for objects with only Väisälä
elements, but the elements themselves are not supplied.
Ephemerides
The ephemerides supplied for minor planets and comets are
perturbed (if the orbits were computed with perturbations) and can be
generated over the time period 1900 to 2040. Objects with unperturbed
orbit solutions will return unperturbed ephemerides. Objects must be
identified in images by their motion, not by their apparent closeness
to a predicted position.
The time-scale of the supplied ephemerides is UTC.
If you desire a topocentric ephemeris, enter your observatory code
in the appropriate box. When local circumstances are displayed, the
azimuths are reckoned westwards from the south meridian.
As an aide-mémoire, the packed
form of the object's designation (as used on the
astrometric observation record)
is displayed immediately above the ephemeris.
