Uranus and Neptune plots for 09

Here are plots of Uranus and Neptune for 2009.

Uranus:



Neptune:



I had considered reproducing these as I have done for the last 2 years, i.e. getting Cartes du Ciel to plot each planet's position on a week-by-week basis into an animated GIF which I would then use to create a Bezier path overlay using Fireworks and then finish the illustration with certain embellishments. The problem with this is it takes hours of work, assuming I don't do anything wrong...

I wondered if there was some software to do all this. I searched briefly on the weeb to see if there were any utilities or tools. Nothing obvious came up.

One site though discussed capturing the ephemeris of a planet and then plotting that. I suddenly remembered the US Naval Office site. I downloaded the RA and dec values for Uranus and did a plot using Excel! Ha ha. Very easy, and quick, to do. But, now I had a path without a star field background. To add in stars required new additional steps. So, it was beginning to turn into a laborious process again (although a fun application in a spreadsheet).

More web searching. Of course, I kept stumbling across notes astronomy applications like Starry Night and TheSky being able to do this. So, I thought I'd try it in TheSky (the loaner copy I have), as an exercise. I continue to work with this software to better learn it to, in turn, better support users at the CAO, next summer, when I'll be on duty...

So, after some fiddling and reading and experimenting, I got it to work. And, overall, easy and fast! That's what I was after.