Abstract. The photographic observations of 72 visual double stars are presented. The observations were made in the years 1992-1997 with the 60-cm double refractor of the Bosscha Observatory at Lembang.

The study of orbital dynamics and evolution of Solar system small-bodies like asteroids has been conducted regularly with the latest data to ensure and update our understanding of the object’s motion, especially the ones located nearby the Earth. One of its examples is asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewa, which currently known as an Earth Quasi-satellite (QS). In this article, we investigate the orbital dynamics of 469219 Kamo’oalewa by running an N-body numerical integration. It was calculated from its latest orbital solution at epoch JD 2458600.5 using Gauss-Radau scheme provided by IAS15 integrator, which available on REBOUND code package. We found that the co-orbital motion of the asteroid towards Earth happens during time interval (–19.7,19.5) thousand years, with QS–HS transition happening at that period. The current QS motion started 15 years ago and will be transitioning to HS at around 50 years from now. After losing its current state, it will orbit the Sun near the Earth as an Apollo asteroid. We also investigated the secular evolution of this asteroid and found the result that support its QS–HS transition nature. On some occasions like a long period of HS, we found several orbital characteristics that resemble Kozai–Lidov resonance, but it doesn’t hold long before the transition to QS resumes.

Youths and kids in Indonesia since almost two decades ago have been showing significant increase of interest in space sciences, especially astronomy. One of the main factors is due to the annual event of National Science Olympiad which includes Astronomy as the subject. The increasing level of public interest, especially younger generation on astronomical events, such as eclipses, moon sightings, meteor showers has been constantly observed from time to time. Being aware that Astronomy course does not included in primary and secondary education level’s curricula, teachers are somewhat desperate and are not capable to play role as clearing house in science related to space. The IAU Network of Astronomy for School Education Network (IAU-NASE) course was started in 2016 in Machung University, East Java as the pilot project in Indonesia. The course has attracted significant interest from teachers and university staff, especially in East and Middle Java Provinces. Being confident with the enthusiasm of teachers who expressed that NASE course could fulfil their needs to teach and instruct students in a very efficient way, it was organized consecutively at Bandar Lampung, Lampung Province in 2018 and 2019 (hosted by Institut Teknologi Sumatera) and in 2020 at Bandung, West Java Province (hosted by Institut Teknologi Bandung). The most recent NASE course on 21–23 August 2020, conducted in on-line mode, was attended by 74 participants, although primarily aimed at 15 School teachers, and was quite successful. The on-line observational activity turned out to be the most impressive session for the participants. We report and review four years of IAU NASE courses in Indonesia, with various documentation and brief analysis of the positive impact to the teachers and instructors attitude in teaching astronomy at secondary level of education.

Night sky brightness (NSB) research related to the artificial light pollution issues has been increasing all over the world, using various measurement techniques and tools. The research produces tens of thousands of data for each month such that proper handling, processing and analysing the data become challenging. In this article, we demonstrate an alternative method for processing the NSB data by utilising pattern recognition techniques: Canny edge detection and Hough transform. These techniques were applied to identify data and extract important parameter from the NSB density plot semi-automatically. Datasets collected from Bandung, Garut, Subang and Sumedang used as the test cases. Three time-segments (dusk, night and dawn) became the main focus of the analyses and our method successfully extracted following parameters: the rate of sky brightness change at dusk and dawn, the average NSB at night and the intersections which indicate transition time. This method, along with its many possible improvements, enables us to process data more effectively and encourage more observation campaigns to be conducted in the future.

In our previous work, we investigated the orbital dynamics of Asteroid 1934 CT (or 1989 Toutatis) from epoch 2012-Jul-24 (JDE2456132.5) using the Mercury program package. Asteroid 4179 Toutatis has an Earth and Mars crossing orbit with semimajor axis a = 2.5292 AU and eccentricity e = 0.6294, and therefore the perihelion distance is q = 0.9373 AU and the aphelion distance is Q = 4.1211 AU. After more than 300,000 years, asteroid 4179 Toutatis will escape from the Solar System, but during this time, it will have close-encounters with other planets from Venus to Uranus. As a continuation of this project, we investigated its energy changes in each close encounter. We also determine the energy of this asteroid when it escapes from the Solar System. The result is that during its orbital evolution, the energy of this asteroid changes and gives us negative, zero and positive values.