NEOvisualizer
This page is a prototype for supporting the planning (and it is 'support' only, there's still a lot of manual work...) of our asteroid follow-up observations at the Optical Ground Station (OGS), ESA's 1-m telescope on Tenerife. Feel free to use it for your own NEO observation planning purposes - and please let me have your feedback!
What it does is the following:
- You enter your observatory code (in our case J04)
- You set which objects you want to have visualized - objects from the NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP), from the priority list of the Spaceguard Central Node (SCN) the 'urgent objects' and/or 'necessary objects'.
- It posts this list onto the ephemerid checker of the Minor Planet Center
and retrieves the ephemerides, elevation above the horizon and other geometrical
information
- It visualizes the elevation of the selected objects for your observing site in color-coded bar charts.
Disclaimer: This page is purely intended to help me understand
how the planning process for asteroid follow-up observations could be automated.
If you use it you do so on your own risk and I cannot be held responsible
for any negative results you get from using this page.
This page created 04 Jan 2011, dvk (Detlef [dot] Koschny [at] esa [dot] int). Last update 29 Jan 2012 (fixed some bugs, e.g. wrong link to 1-h ephem files) - any comments appreciated.