PRO-MOTIONS PROper MOTION Software

Caleb WherryAustin Peay State University, TN

NASA's Undergraduate Student Research ProgramCalifornia Institute of Technology

Jet Propulsion LaboratoryMentor: Dr. Raghvendra Sahai

Overview• What is Proper Motion?

– Proper Motion

– Image Registration (Preliminaries)

– Central Star Location

• Calculating Proper Motion

– Selecting Fiducial Features in Nebula

– Radially Symmetric Expansion

• Applications of Proper Motion Measurements

– Age of Nebula

– 3D Movement of Nebula

What is Proper Motion?

• Proper motion

– Proper motion is the movement of a celestial body across the sky (parallel to our line of sight).

Image Registration

PRO-MOTIONS GUI

Central Star Location

Calculation of Proper Motion

Reasoning Behind Calculation

• How do measurements of single proper motions yield the proper motion of the nebula as a whole?

– Average motion experienced by symmetric pairs.

– Average motion experienced by ALL symmetric pairs combined.

• Proper motion of the nebula has to subtracted out of individual proper motions in order to get the actual proper motion of the feature.

Why do these measurements?

• Calculate the age of the nebula and the features in it.

• 3D expansion of the nebula.

Questions?

Comments?