Horizons Comet Processing Lessons

Wade Hilmo

I just had a chance to watch the comet processing lessons from Horizons.

I really enjoyed it, and learned some new things, since I've never processed comet data before.  My only disappointment is that I watched most of it in anticipation of how you would handle the star residual that overlapped the comet's tail - but that part of processing was omitted from the lessons!

Is there any chance that you might go back and do a specific lesson on how you handled that?  I don't know that I have the processing skills to handle it as well as you did (rather, I know that I couldn't).  I would enjoy it even more if it included some thinking and things that didn't work out for you along the way.  That really helps me to understand how you approach these kinds of problems.

More generally, I would love to see you spend some time on handling star residuals in a number of different scenarios.  With the advent (and improvement) of things like Starnet++ and StarXTerminator, I think that this is going to be more relevant as people start to use them more broadly.

Thanks,

-Wade