Requiem for Relativity

Dr. Keller, it would seem that TVF may be able to wield some influence with the USNO, given his long tenure there.

<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 />Dr. Keller, it would seem that TVF may be able to wield some influence with the USNO, given his long tenure there.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Thanks for making this point! My retired Army officer friend warned me that many people usually are clamoring for the attention of the commander (to whom one of my letters to the USNO was addressed).

<i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />Bradford robotic telescope images, the first is at 11 07 24, -6 38 50
next at 11 06 02. -6 28 27

Go to the Bradford web site and look at the latest jobs, these are nem2 and nem3. ..."

How does one look at the jobs? I now have a Bradford account, but it's only passive, because I didn't see how to ask approval for submitting jobs. My "help" email to them went unanswered.

All the stars in these photos drift slightly which isn't a fatal defect, but one should be aware of it. The Bradford website says that a recent drift problem has been fixed.

My latest best guess for the coordinates:

RA 11h 09m 00s Decl -6deg 51' 00" (and the slope of the track is -7.5' Decl per 1m RA)

Good luck!

I received no response overnight from any of the six U. of Strasbourg astronomy faculty I emailed yesterday.

Let's assume that Barbarossa's moons (probably really planets!) Frey & Freya have equal mass and orbit a common center of gravity, max 0.8" apart. Let's assume also that their orbit about Barbarossa is circular, almost coplanar with Barbarossa's orbit about the sun, and only tilted toward or away from the sun. If the alleged Proper Motions in the USNO-B catalog, of Objects #1-5,7,8 (#6 excluded as an outlier) really are due to the separation between Barbarossa's position, say, yesterday, and points along the end of a narrow ellipse, say, today, mistakenly attributed to one year's motion, then they should fall on a parabola whose axis is Barbarossa's track. I found the least-squares best-fitting such parabola.

The semiminor axis of the apparent orbital ellipse, is the geometric mean of the semimajor axis, and the radius of curvature at the vertex of the above approximate parabola. With or without a rough correction for the nonzero distance between the moons, I got 14 or 11deg tilt, resp. The position of the main (eastward) moon(s) in the above pixel analysis, gives 7.1deg. This agrees, because really, there also will be a small tilt in the other direction, which brings a flatter part of the ellipse (i.e., not the very end) into alignment, reduces the curvature of the best parabola through the PMs, and causes overestimation of the semiminor axis.

I just now separately emailed five individuals in the U.S., associated with the IAU surveys dept., asking the date of "SERC.ER.DSS2.713", from the plate that shows Barbarossa. A few minutes ago, I found a chart online indicating that the "SERC-ER" plates were made 1984-1998. Previously elsewhere online I'd learned that they were made at La Silla ("the Saddle", in Chile, at 2400m altitude) using a Schmidt telescope which was decommissioned in Dec. 1998.

This, together with the June 1983 IRAS observation (including Earth parallax correction) of Source #1 above, implies a prograde orbit for Barbarossa, of period not more than 4300 yr, assuming a circular orbit. The measurement (COBE error bars) and theoretical (uncataloged gravitating bodies near 50-60 A.U.) uncertainties of the CMB dipole progression, imply that a slow prograde orbit for Barbarossa, does not entirely refute my CMB theory.

The outer planetary resonance discrepancies are more consistent with pro- than with retrograde orbit for Barbarossa. Uranus' frequency is slightly less than twice Neptune's. Jupiter's frequency is slightly less than thrice Saturn's.

Freya is dimming linearly with time. Barbarossa (period, 4430 yr according to the average of the relevant outer planetary resonance discrepancies; see above) is slightly closer than its average 270 A.U. distance, but moving away in a moderately elliptical orbit.

Using the latest possible, Dec. 1998, date for Object #3 (probably older telescopes would be relegated to sky surveys), then Objects #4, #6, & #8 must be discarded. Objects #4 & #8 were the ones which overlay galaxies. Furthermore Object #8 is the only one of the eight, whose dimmer magnitude would need to be explained as the sum of Frey's & Freya's fluxes. Object #6 is the only one excluded from the "PM parabola" above as an outlier.

The remaining Objects #5, #1, IRAS Source #1, Objects #7, #2 & #3 (listed in increasing RA) span 24 yrs. This is likely, especially if the USNO-B plates span somewhat less than the stated 50 yrs. in this region, or are sparse for early years.

If Object #3's date is the earliest possible, Jan. 1984, then Barbarossa would have moved almost 60 degrees by now. The probability density per unit distance on the track, is much higher near positions implied by dates close to 1998, i.e., near the least possible RA. Later dates are more consistent, with Barbarossa's apparent magnitude, and with a more circular orbit. The least possible RA, with corresponding Decl, is about

RA 11h 20m 45s Decl -8deg 20'

I suggest searching from this point eastward, using the slope

-7.4' Decl per 1m RA.