Gallery: Vesta
Image taken by STEREO HI2A satellite imager
(processed and submitted by Alan Watson)
Fig 1: Vesta, at about mag 6.5 and a distance of a little over 1.5 AUs, appears faint but that's because of the field of view, which is approximately 15°. γ Sag is the bright star at bottom left edge and θ Oph is the bright star on the right edge.
| Image Parameter | Details |
| Image Date (UTC): | 2007-10 |
| Image Time (UTC): | |
| Exposure: | |
| Filter: | |
| Field of View: | cropped from the originals, ~ 15° |
| Observing Site: | STEREO A spacecraft |
| Observing Equipment: | SECCHI HI: Heliospheric Imager |
| Digital Processing: | |
| Comments: | Please find attached (GIF anim) a different view of Vesta as seen in the STEREO HI2A satellite imager.
The image is of VESTA passing by M8 around the middle of Oct 2007. These images were processed from publicly released FITS images at the NASA STEREO web site. The only processing was to contrast adjust and then register the images to stop the stars from moving, then a crop and scale 2x all using ImageJ software and plugins. Ceres has now entered the STEREO HI2A imager and will be visible here for several weeks. I would be very interested to know if any of the image data from DAWN will be available in FITS form to the Public, similar to the STEREO and SOHO programs? Is there opportunity to use these images to detect unknown asteroids as the craft transits to Vesta and Ceres? As it seem that proximity to the asteroid belt would be a big advantage. Also some asteroids would appear to have comet like aspects which may be detectable. Thank you for the image! Very interesting! Can you be more specific with the dates? How did you go about figuring out that Vesta was in the field of view? Just trying to get some of the story to put with the image... I don't know if Dawn will be collecting images during the cruise portions. They probably will do some calibrations etc during which they'll get images. I'm more familiar with Deep Impact and now EPOXI... Because the science goals and procedures are a bit different for Discovery missions than for SOHO and STEREO, which are more of a monitoring type mission, the data will get released, just not as soon as with SOHO and STEREO. The scientists are given a limited amount of time to properly process and do some analysis of the data. Each mission has a deadline by when its data must be put into the Planetary Data Systems Small Bodies Node (http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/). Right now, I don't know what those deadlines are for Dawn or EPOXI, but with Deep Impact it was about 6 months after the end of the mission. Mission scientists usually keep working on the data for many more months and even years but typically with a Discovery Data Analysis program (DDAP) grant (one of the research opportunities listed in ROSES). Of course, once the data is archived, it is accessible by anyone. A little about the Discovery program: http://discovery.nasa.gov/program.html http://discoverynewfrontiers.msfc.nasa.gov/ ROSES http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/ I am not at all familiar with the rules for the data release and archiving of the SOHO and STEREO missions. This image sequence is from 20071006-20071010, the imager has time steps of 2hrs. The wide field of view is approx 120 degrees, and has Jupiter and many other features visible. I used Starry Night software to located the star field and Cartes du Ciel to confirm the asteroid location. Cartes du Ciel is better for asteroid updates than Starry Night. The fits data that the HI2a imager gathers can be used very easily with ImageJ. I am sure students could use this data and measurements from their own images to track Vesta. |
Table 1: Data about image.