This is a 17 frame movie I made of the Minor Planet 1 Ceres (AKA the
biggest asteroid in the asteroid belt) via Hubble telescope data from
December 28, 2003 with the ACS
This movie represents ~8 hours and 40 minutes of rotation.
It took me quite some time to process this, and I had to learn a lot
on the way. Also, I searched around the Hubble site trying to find
these files because I saw a reference on Wikipedia and a color image
of Ceres and read that they had acquired shots over many hours,
however, I couldn't find an animation on the internet, only 6 small
jpegs were on the Hubble site, and the original FITS format files were
not available on the Hubble archive site, but I did find a reference
to them being on a University website, which after un-compressing
ended up being over a gigabyte. I went through 279 files to select
these frames, which used the same filter F555W, which although cited
in an article related to this project as as a Red filter, I've found
other references to the F555W as being Green, which seems to make more
sense to me if the Hubble filter number is referring to how many
nanometers the wavelength of light is.) In the FITS data file I find a
citation and assume that this data was originally acquired by an
astronomer team made up of J.-Y. Li, , E. F.Young, , P. C. Thomas, ,
J. Wm. Parker, , L. A.McFadden, , C. T. Russell, , S. A. Stern, , and
M. V. Sykes.
For comparision, here's a somewhat lacking picture of Ceres posted on
APOD in 2006
> This is a 17 frame movie I made of the Minor Planet 1 Ceres (AKA the
> biggest asteroid in the asteroid belt) via Hubble telescope data from
> December 28, 2003 with the ACS
> This movie represents ~8 hours and 40 minutes of rotation.
> It took me quite some time to process this, and I had to learn a lot
> on the way. Also, I searched around the Hubble site trying to find
> these files because I saw a reference on Wikipedia and a color image
> of Ceres and read that they had acquired shots over many hours,
> however, I couldn't find an animation on the internet, only 6 small
> jpegs were on the Hubble site, and the original FITS format files were
> not available on the Hubble archive site, but I did find a reference
> to them being on a University website, which after un-compressing
> ended up being over a gigabyte. I went through 279 files to select
> these frames, which used the same filter F555W, which although cited
> in an article related to this project as as a Red filter, I've found
> other references to the F555W as being Green, which seems to make more
> sense to me if the Hubble filter number is referring to how many
> nanometers the wavelength of light is.) In the FITS data file I find a
> citation and assume that this data was originally acquired by an
> astronomer team made up of J.-Y. Li, , E. F.Young, , P. C. Thomas, ,
> J. Wm. Parker, , L. A.McFadden, , C. T. Russell, , S. A. Stern, , and
> M. V. Sykes.
> For comparision, here's a somewhat lacking picture of Ceres posted on
> APOD in 2006
|
