BAA Christmas Meeting
in
The BAA had a very successful observing session on Faulkes Telescope South during their Christmas Meeting at Burlington House in London last Saturday 12th December 2009.
On October 20th 2009, a new observing campaign was instigated under the auspices of the Asteroids and Remote Planets Section of the British Astronomical Association. It is called Project NeilBone and is dedicated to the memory of a BAA Section Director, Neil Bone, and aims to observe asteroids which reach a phase angle of 0.20 degrees or less at opposition. The objective is to measure the so called phase curve and opposition surge in brightness of each such object.
Last Saturday, there were two main targets as part of Project NeilBone. One was the asteroid (1645) Waterfield, named after BAA member, Reggie Waterfield, a long time observer of comets and asteroids, (1645) reached opposition within an hour of the start of their observing session whilst at a phase angle of just 0.06 degrees. The other was to image (7102) Neilbone, the namesake asteroid of the project. They achieved both in addition to obtaining photometric-quality images of (121) Hermione, which had just passed opposition 4 days earlier, as well as calibrating the sky using two Hipparcos stars at different altitudes in the sky.
The audience of about 80 were enthralled to see the images coming in live on the lecture screen and were able to see how the images were taken, there was also a question and answer session which involved explaining the various ins and outs of the Faulkes telescopes.
