Murison continued working on a paper describing results from the first stage of the orbit-orbit distance project, writing text and verifying the various analytical calculations.

Summer student Munteanu completed his work on a numerical program that calculates elliptic restricted three-body problem orbits, providing various visualizations of chaotic trajectories and fractal phase space structures.

Murison noticed that a local image distortion function of the form

and is confined to the disk , appears to mimic the atmospheric seeing distortions encountered in ground-based astronomical images. (Solar images were used as test cases.) The function represents the image flux at image position , the constants a, b, and d determine the strengths of the distortions, is the linear tip/tilt shift of the isoplanatic patch, and is a second-order barrel distortion applied to a local disk of radius R, centered at Both distortions are attenuated by a parabolic envelope that goes to zero at the disk boundary. It should be possible to correct a distorted image, relative to a reference (e.g., a stacked average of several images), by optimizing on the number of local distortion disks, their radii, centers, and distortion strengths. Iterating individual images and their contributions to a stacked average should converge on a well-corrected average image.

Murison again assisted the FTS project by generating observing lists of bright stars, exoplanets, and spectroscopic binaries within reach of the Clay Center telescope. He also learned the new observing setup procedures for FTS alignment remotely via the internet. Alignment is now accomplished with a number of motors and actuators that move various mirrors and blockers into and out of the beam path at various points. Monitoring is aided by webcams mounted inside the FTS enclosure. It's a very cool setup.

The flap regarding 2003 UB₃₁₃ is amusing. The Solar System has eight major planets. Pluto is not a major planet. Get over it.