Hi Kurt and all who posted on and off list comments about using the images to calculate the distance to the target. After all the work that went into those messages (especially Kurt's and one I received from someone on the MPML which was REALLY long) I feel a bit sheepish about confessing that when I took the images I really only wanted to get two pictures that I could use to show the effects of parallax in my talks. I never gave any thought to using them to make any calculations. BTW, we tried the same experiment the night before using minor planet (4099) Wiggins (gee, I wonder why we chose that one...) but unlike last night's target which was less than half an AU out, 4099 was nearly two AU and we could detect no obvious parallax. Clear skies! patrick On 30 Jul 2010, at 15:38, Canopus56 wrote:
Patrick,
Not that you need my help on the math, but below are three posts with background info on the analogous problem of computing the distance to Mars based on diurnal parallax. I will have to dig out the stored parallax construction that I did from the 2005 Mars opposition and put it back on the Utah Astro Gallery.
The Yerkes Hands-On-Universe 2003 Mars opposition project to replicate measuring the distance to Mars by the diurnal parallax method, referenced in my post, is now at this location:
http://www.handsonuniverse.org/activities/Explorations/MarsParallax/
but they seem to have deprecated the path rights to the math construction documentation.
Here is Pete Lawrence's page from his 2005 attempt at the analogous problem of diurnal parallax:
http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/Marsnight/marsnight-2005-10-23.html
Some where in my archives I have Gill's 1878 paper on measuring the parallax of Mars - which I recall was useful - but it can probably be retrieved out of NASA-ADS with "Gill Acsension report 1878".
My apologies in advance if this post is in the category of "too much information."
Clear Skies - Kurt