About the name RMS

RMS stands for Rowe, McPherson, Sanzone - three families whose financial help make this dream come true. Rowe and Sanzone are my fathers and mothers families, Tommy McPherson was a close family friend.

I am so fortunate to have a life long dream of a backyard observatory come true and am very grateful to all that have made it possible. A friend of mine,  Jerry Guethlein,  built most of it, I assisted when I could and learned a lot about tools, laying a foundation, pouring concrete, framing, roofing, and electric, to name a few. I also could not have done this without the love, support, and encouragement from my wife Dede. 

I thank everyone I am aware of that helped, and those I am not aware of.

Current projects

Currently I focus on astrometry and photometry of asteroids and comets.

Astrometry is the measurement of an objects position in order to better refine its orbit. I focus on newly discovered objects, especially ones that come close to the Earth, or objects with poorly known orbits. For the newly discovered Near Earth Objects (NEO's) it is very important to closely monitor their position for as long as possible to help calculate a sufficiently good orbit so they don't become "lost" (which happens fairly frequently) or to understand if they could impact the Earth in the future. Sometimes when someone asks me "what do you do?" I say, "I help protect the Earth from total destruction", in a very small way. The astrometric positions are sent to the Minor Planet Center.

Photometry is the measurement of an objects brightness. When an asteroid's brightness is measured over enough time (usually several nights) it is possible to calculate a rotation period based on its varying brightness (lightcurve). This information is useful for things like understanding an asteroid's internal structure (is it solid or a "rubble pile"), does it have a moon, radar observations, spacecraft missions, and can also be used to create a 3-D model of the asteroid's shape. Asteroid measurements are published in the Minor Planet Bulletin and in the ALCDEF Database. Comet photometry can be useful in helping predict the behavior of these "unpredictable" objects. Comet measurements are published in the Comet Observation Database.

Here is a asteroid lightcurve with a rotation period of about 11.4 hours. Data was taken at the RMS Observatory, the graph was created with MPO Canopus. The data was taken when I was beginning my learning curve on how to best do this so there is a fair amount of scatter in the data points.

Here is a comet lightcurve showing the trend over many months. Some of the data is mine.