Requiem for Relativity

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by nemesis</i>
<br />I saw the U. of Iowa website photo, Joe. An arrow to specify Barbarossa may be helpful.
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Thanks for taking a look, and for posting your comment! The median-stacked U. of Iowa image which I sent to Bob Turner, and which he posted here, is better than the unstacked photo on the U. of Iowa website. Barbarossa's image on the U. of I. website photo is, at best, a statistical pixel density, and not impressive to see.

Though the stacked image file had built-in coordinates, it might not be convenient, to put arrows near the positions of Barbarossa & Frey; arrows might cover important details. One can put an Aladin (through VizieR) photo in another window, and use it to find coordinates. Better, if you like I can email you the file: you can download a free FITS viewer quickly from the NRAO, and I can help with those details via private email (a FITS viewer preserves details of a FITS file which are lost in translation to other versions such as GIF). The quickest, is to follow the instructions below, to find Barbarossa & Frey on the "Liberator" processed version of the stacked U. of Iowa image, which Bob Turner posted above.

The benefit of the photo on the homepage of astro.physics.uiowa.edu, is social. When adminstrators of other government telescopes, see that the U. of Iowa pointed its telescope at "Barbarossa", they'll be more willing to point their own telescopes there. If someone says, "Ha ha, you took a photo of Barbarossa instead of the Big Bang; you lose your grants & tenure," my supporter can say, "The U. of Iowa took a photo too." My academic supporters now have "a bigger dog".

A dot, no matter how starlike, proves little unless one is satisfied that it does not appear on other photos, and that these "disappearing dots" define orbits to significant accuracy. Many wish they could resolve the issue by saying, "Oh, your dot's not very good." That never will resolve the issue. Near the limit of CCD detection, real bodies may appear fragmented or absent.

Even "not very good" dots, if enough of them conform to an orbit with enough accuracy, imply real bodies. If anyone wants to check my math and look at my dots, he may email me privately for all eight (4 Barbarossa & 4 Frey) positions and photos; so far no one has done that.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />I found a really good photoshop fits filter at spacetelescope.org Much better image. Go to the website and then to projects, it's called liberator.
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The "Liberator" FITS filter image you posted with this message, shows Barbarossa & Frey plainly, on the messageboard screen as is, though they're better with a magnifying glass.

1. "Barbarossa", the more massive body, is at RA 11:28:22.079, Decl -9:16:6.42. "Frey", the main moon of Barbarossa, is at RA 11:29:4.656, Decl -9:07:2.28 (information copied from my Dec. 23 post).

2. In the previous picture, with the grid, go to Barbarossa's coordinates; near Barbarossa's position, is a small 3:5:6 right triangle standing on its narrowest angle, with its hypotenuse on the left. Now go to the gridless picture; Barbarossa is the brightest star (quite dim, but easily visible) anywhere near the hypotenuse line of this triangle. It's nearer to the brightest (upper left) star of the triangle.

3. Likewise, on the grid picture, find the rather bright star near Frey's position. Now go to the gridless picture; this star is the righthand star of an equilateral triangle standing on its base (the base is somewhat sloped upwards toward the right). The peak star of the triangle is much dimmer than the other two. Frey is the star, much dimmer yet, slightly to the left of this peak star.

A few things about those images. For people with photoshop, I suggest downloading both images. Open the one with the grid lines, then use the ruler tool to follow a grid line. Then go into rotate arbitrary and you will see that the angle to rotate the image has been put in for you by the ruler tool.

As I say, the telescope has been closed down for recalibration because someone has noticed that the image has become slightly skewed. All telescopes can have this problem from time to time. It's a bit of a tricky job even with computer assistance.

Rotate the second image by that amount as well. Now there is a bog standard fits plugin for photoshop but compared to this Nasa/Esa Liberator plugin its rubbish. The first image, I sharpened up in a fits viewer program called fv. Much much better than the raw fits file but again, whats clearly a spiral galaxy, right of centre, still looks like a smudged star in fv.

What I would suggest to anyone that Joe has sent the fits to, is to use the liberator plugin, and get that spiral galaxy to look as good as can be. Then zoom into the area where Joe's proposed planet is and see if we can find anything to be tightened up further. My image was sharpened up after only about two minute's playing with all of the controls of a new filter, it could be better.

Remember that when we see this object, we would be looking at reflected sunlight that's made a near four hundred a.u. trip. So, it might be worthwhile looking for wisps of basic muck around the object. Any sign of a halo should get people's attention. Then the next job would be to get someone to take a spectrum of the offending object. We still need more images to do a blink comparison, and refine its orbit, but the shortcut is to get a spectrum.

Hi Prof. *******!

The U. of Iowa got a photo for me Dec. 22, 2008. It shows both jovian bodies, Barbarossa and Frey. I now have four time points (albeit two are sky surveys) for this twin planet, showing center of mass progression, accurate to a very few arcsec, consistent with a nearly circular 198 AU orbit. I also now have the binary orbit (real orbit, e=0.24) found by simultaneously equalizing the three areas for Kepler's second law, with one adjustable parameter needed to define the apparent ellipse (because I only had four points). The binary orbit differs from Kepler's law by only an arcsec. I was surprised by the binary orbit, because I'd thought the binary orbit was something much different, when I found these objects on this (median stacked) photo which aren't on the sky survey.

The U. of Iowa website posted the photo for awhile, calling it "Barbarossa", but this week someone ordered the name censored, maybe because they want the IAU to name it, not me. So, now there's no name on the photo at all, only a serial number. The U. of Iowa says their telescope broke soon after this photo, and I don't know when they'll get another. Naturally I'd like anyone and everyone to image this area everyway. The magnitudes are about +18 or +19. Details are on a post I made to the "Requiem for Relativity" thread on Dr. Van Flandern's messageboard at www.metaresearch.org , on Jan. 4 (a good place to start).

Sincerely,
Joe Keller

Hi Joe, it's likely that they changed the title because there is already an asteroid called Barbarossa.

One idea that you might want to consider. The Bradford actually knocks down the size of the fits that can be downloaded. This is because bandwidth costs money. They will have your last image as a file of about ten meg. Ask them to take a look at it, and compare it to the sky survey image, and offer to send them the Iowa image. Personally I'd play down the name, say that it's an interim designation.

With a bit of luck they might take a better shot with one of the bigger telescopes on the site. Remember that the astronomers, on site, have a lot of impressive toys to play with, the robotic telescope is something that they'll only check from time to time.

Have you scaled the sky survey images to fit the Iowa image? A fits viewer should do it automatically but if someone is using the liberator photoshop plugin it would have to be requested at the right size from the sky survey, or have to be scaled by hand in photoshop.

(Edited) I wouldn't mention Frey, as it would be apt to confuse them.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />...there is already an asteroid called Barbarossa. ...
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Asteroid #1036 (discovered by Baade in 1924), the biggest of the "Amor" family, is named Ganymed, essentially the same as Ganymede, Jupiter's moon. In Missouri, towns often were named for states. Sometimes one must ask, "Do you mean Louisiana (or California or Nevada) Missouri, or the state?"