Hi all,
We are currently implementing new features in our plate solving and annotation scripts, and lack the necessary real-world data to test them thoroughly. We'd appreciate if you could provide us with images suitable for testing these features. We need images that comply with the following requisites:
- Required: Acquisition time metadata. We need to know the date the image was acquired, accurate to within one minute if possible in the case of inner planets (see below), or to within one hour or so for the rest of objects. For example, if your image has been acquired in FITS format and has a valid DATE-OBS header keyword generated by your acquisition software, that would be ideal.
- Required: Images with planets and/or asteroids. The new features that we are testing involve calculation of high-accuracy solar system ephemerides, which we must test against real data. We need images with:
- One or more of: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
- One or more of the 343 most massive asteroids included in DE430's numerical integration—see the list attached to this post as a plain text file, which you can open in PixInsight's Script Editor. For example, if you have images covering relatively large areas of the Ecliptic, the probability that you have recorded one of these asteroids is high. In such case, even if you don't know whether you have one of these asteroids in the image or not, you can send it to us if it complies with the rest of requirements.
- Geodetic coordinates of the observer. It would be great if you could provide at least the approximate longitude and latitude (also height if possible) of the location where the image was acquired.
- Linear images. To perform the accurate plate solving and measurement tasks that we need to test the new features, we need unstretched (linear) images. We cannot perform valid PSF measurements on stretched images.
Thank you so much in advance!
