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REDIGEST Re: (meteorobs) Phaeton directly imaged or spectrographed?


[Apologies for yet another resend - this is for those who may not have seen 
this post on the Digest... MajorDomo can be *finicky*! -Lew]

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Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 15:42:19 -0700
From: elgb@lowell.Lowelldot edu (E. L. G. Bowell)
To: dedalus@latrade.com, mplist@bitnik.com
Subject: Re: Phaeton directly imaged or spectrographed?
Cc: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com, meteorobs@latrade.com,
        nsaac@latrade.com

>Then a really *intriguing* question came up: have Phaeton's size or
>composition ever been directly measured? This would provide valuable
>clues on the Geminids!
>
>This seems far-fetched, considering Phaeton's faintness and inferior
>position to us. But after a *great* talk by Bob Donahue of Mt. Wilson
>Observatory at our last local NSAAC club meeting, touching on both
>visual interferometry and extreme high-resolution imaging with Adaptive
>Optics, it occurred to me this just MIGHT be possible... :)

The only physical data on 3200 Phaeton were published by Wisniewski et al.
(Icarus 126, 395, 1997), in which a lightcurve period of 4.08 +/- 0.08 hr is
given. I don't think any colorimetry or spectroscopy has been published.

Phaeton is indeed a shy creature. For the next few apparitions it reaches its
brightest in conjunction with the Sun, barely peeping above V = 17 mag at
observable solar elongations. The next bright apparition is in 2008 (V = 13 mag,
elongation = 110 deg). You can check out observability of asteroids at one of
the Lowell Observatory web sites: http://asteroid.lowelldot edu/cgi-bin/koehn/obs.

Regards...Ted Bowell

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