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Hawaii Photo
on Apr 7, 2003

I managed to capture another image of Planet X last night from sea level in Hawaii. The photo was taken about 8:00 PM and I used the HNsky Program and the coordinates given for April 7. I had to put my digital camera on it's highest quality setting to get an image (I could only fit four images on my memory card as apposed to ninety-three with the settings I used to get an image seven days ago). Planet X is now much larger in size, but with much lower light intensity. It appears that Planet X and it's moons are now engulfed in a cloud of dust. I imagine this is because Planet X is now slowing down.
Chris

Don't be surprised if a 20x zoom rivals Rent-A-Scope frames, for instance, when I use my 8*21 binoculars, the field of view that I see is the Hyades circle. So better binoculars could see finer details.
Naji

Indeed, Chris has captured Planet X at a moment when it is braking, the momentum in the dust cloud pushing it forward around the corpus and sides.

Chris does not say whether or not 7 zoom is all optical and no digital zoom. But Chris’s 1.2 megapixel mode saves 93 fotos and his 5 megapixel mode saves only 4 fotos on his flash-memory card. It might be that 1.2 mp fotos are stored as JPEGS and his 5 mp fotos are stored as TIFF files ( as that for French Photog ). Actually Chris' star chart with Planet X is not a 10 megabyte JPEG but a 1 megabyte JPEG of a 5 mp foto. It seems then that much confusion is possible if calibration of field of view is not done for the maximum zoom used for a particular resolution mode, unless the digital zoom option is disabled. Field of view calibration should convert vertical feet ( or meters ) height and distance for an object into degrees of field of view, which is the same for short distances as well as planet/star length distances.
zoom                       7           7         20         17.5
vert field degs            5.4         5.4        1.89       2.16
vertical resolution      960        1920       1920       1920
arcsec per pixel          20.25       10.125      3.54       4.05
min pixel diam             4          86         23         86
Px Charted Dist            0.930       0.701      0.701      0.701
  from sun (bil miles)
Calc Px Corpus Diam      401,696   3,351,587    313,724  1,340,634
  (in miles )
# times Px core size      12.67x     105.70x      9.89x     42.28x
The above result shows the work of Chris at 7 x, the Frenchman at 20 x, and Chris at 7 x optical + 2.5 x digital zoom enabled for a 17.5 total zoom . In either case, it appears the Planet X Corpus is growing wildly as the Planet X slows and the dust tail overtakes Px and adds to its effective Corpus diameter.
J