Celestia Forums

Here is couple of interesting websites about determining shapes of asteroids from their lightcurves:

New worlds in our solar system
Lightcurve observation and analysis

The latter site has a lightcurve database, as well as several downloadable shape data files.

It's rather cool how accurate asteroid shapes can be generated just studying their apparent brightnesses. Because accuracy of the models depend on the quality of lightcurves, it is a field of astronomy that really needs amateur involvement.

Since Phoebe is probaby a captured asteroid(and other minor moons of the solar system,too),maybe now someone could do an accurate model of the saturnian moon,a Phoebe texture and update it in Celestia.What do you think?

Ynjevi wrote:Here is couple of interesting websites about determining shapes of asteroids from their lightcurves:

New worlds in our solar system
Lightcurve observation and analysis

The latter site has a lightcurve database, as well as several downloadable shape data files.

It's rather cool how accurate asteroid shapes can be generated just studying their apparent brightnesses. Because accuracy of the models depend on the quality of lightcurves, it is a field of astronomy that really needs amateur involvement.