Requesting observations of
Solar System Objects Without a Published Ephemeris

These objects will usually be new slowly moving objects discovered by the user or by some other observer, which haven't yet received an official designation from the Minor Planet Center, and therefore need to be confirmed on a second night. Fast moving asteroid discoveries should be communicated immediately to the MPC, which would provide approximate ephemeris on the NEO Confirmation Page. Requesting observations of objects in this category is similar to requesting observations of objects with published ephemeris, except that you will need to supply ephemerides for the objects you wish to observe. This feature is often used for second night follow-up of objects discovered during mosaic searches. To request observations of objects without published ephemeris, you should:

• Assign to each object a temporary 6-character designation. To prevent confusion with designations created by other observers, please avoid designations such as T00001, UNK005, NEW013 which have a higher probability of being in use by others. We suggest that you use designations of the form AAANNN where AAA is your 3-character user ID (assigned to you when you opened your user account at Tenagra) and NNN is a 3-digit number.  Save the output from the New Object Ephemeris Generator to disk in HTML format. The name of the saved file should have one of the extensions .html or .htm, and should not contain blank spaces.

• Enter the available astrometric measurements of your objects in the New Object Ephemeris Generator, producing ephemeris for the next nights. Make sure to use the following options in the ephemeris request form:
  • Observatory code: 926
  • Start date for the ephemerides: use the current UT date
  • Number of ephemeris positions to output: 7
  • Ephemeris interval: 24 hours (do not select "1 day")
  • Display ephemeris positions in full sexagesimal format
  • Display motions in degrees per day
  • Display motions as total motion and direction

• Save the output from the New Object Ephemeris Generator to disk in HTML format. The name of the saved file should have one of the extensions .html or .htm.
  Note: If you request ephemerides for a large number of objects, it may be necessary to generate more than one HTML file containing ephemerides, since the New Object Ephemeris Generator has a limit on the number of observations it can process.

• Prepare a text file containing observation requests using the same format used for solar system objects with a published ephemeris, but changing the initial 3-character field from SSP to SSU. This text file should have extension .txt. For examples of the observation format, see the section on solar system objects with a published ephemeris.

• Upload both the text file containing observation requests and the HTML file(s) containing ephemerides to your area on the Tenagra FTP server.

If you wish to set up an account on the Tenagra II telescope click here.

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