[X] My Assistant

[fredk]

What's rising?
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...NCAM00545M_.JPG

[fredk]

Nice!

And a quick animation of the frames so far:

[atomoid]

..And a quick animation of the frames so far...

very nice indeed, this actually poses an interesting puzzle. So this is perhaps looking at the eastern horizon before solrise with Phobos soon to set. And it looks like Deimos is going retrograde against the background of stars and that must be due to a parallax effect of the MSL observation point sweeping underneath and overtaking Deimos' actual slower motion in the same direction as Phobos..?

hoping for a m100 transit if the cam can take it, hopefully in the right place to get one as good as the old Oppy one. Colors come out in the HiRise pics..

[mcaplinger]

very nice indeed, this actually poses an interesting puzzle....
hoping for a m100 transit if the cam can take it...

Deimos moves E-W and Phobos moves W-E because of the rotation of Mars, so I'm not sure what your retrograde reference is to.

If you didn't like the grazing observations last year, there are more chances coming up later in the month. http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EPS...PSC2012-326.pdf

[atomoid]

..I'm not sure what your retrograde reference is to..

Relative to the background of stars (not horizon), both moons should be moving in the same direction. However, FredK's animation and the source files show apparent retrograde motion of Deimos relative to those stars. The time span of the sequence is only about 2 minutes which works out to something like 30 miles which doesnt seem enough for any sort of parallax effect. joes mapper says camera bearing 80.39° (E), elevation 58.64° so they arent even at zenith to mazimize that effect, I tried out a quick sim in Stellarium based on the Bradbury landing coordinates and one of the stars in the pair above could be HIP53525 with the lone one below perhaps HIP54084. But maybe these apparent 'stars' are dead pixel artifacts fixed on the frame that are masquerading as stars so there's really no apparent retrograde motion of Deimos (or perhaps most likely ive just lost my mind)

and thanks for the grazing schedule link, oh the things you can miss when you are away on vacation, looking forward to next week!

[mcaplinger]

But maybe these apparent 'stars' are dead pixel artifacts fixed on the frame...

Yes, almost certainly. Remember that exposing for the Moon/a moon is like exposing for any other (admittedly dark) sunlit object, so these exposure times were fairly short.