For the past two summers, I had an easy job. That is, easy to talk about. Every conversation went something like:
“So, what’s your job?”
“Oh, well I’m doing research up at Westmont. I’m working with the new telescope.”
“Oh really! How interesting. What are you looking at?”
“Well, this summer I’m looking at asteroid orbits by performing astrometry on CCD images. Since the asteroid is much closer to us than the stars, it moves relative to them in successive photos looking at the same coordinates in the sky. We take three to five images like that each night for about a week, then use those points and essentially “regress” an orbit out of them, since each set of points only corresponds to one orbit.”
“Wow, that’s interesting. What is the goal?”
“Well once we get an orbit, we can plot it, and see how close we are to the accepted literature. If we determine that our telescope is accurate enough, we can submit data to the Harvard Minor Planet Center and potentially get published in their circulars. We can also do some real nice asteroid research. There are always critical-list objects whose orbits aren’t nicely defined and need to be observed more, or we could look at Near-Earth Objects, which have the potential to cross Earth’s path.”
“Wow, how interesting! What an intelligent and attractive physicist-to-be you are!” (more…)
