This web page was inspired by the realization that asteroid astrometry observations reported to the Minor Planet Center often include brightness estimates that are typically too faint by 1 or 2 magnitudes (for the faint asteroids). I'm accustomed to sweating long hours to produce photometry sequences with an accuracy of 0.03 magnitude, which is about 2 orders of magnitude better than these MPC submissions. "Surely," I told myself, "by deleting a few terms from my complete equations it should be possible to achieve an accuracy on the order of 0.15 magnitude." Indeed, if this accuracy is acceptable the "color terms" can be dropped, atmospheric extinction can be treated carelessly, subtle considerations in choosing photometry aperture sizes can be ignored, and a host of other details that consume the bulk of effort can be neglected. This hope was fulfilled as I developed the short-cut methods described below.

However, something completely unexpected happened, which has slowly diminished the importance of these clever short-cut procedures: It's the advent of J and K magnitudes for nearly every star that an amateur will come in contact with, and the ability to convert from J and K to B, V, Rc and Ic. These conversions are so accurate that there is no longer a need for most of the other short-cut methods. I now recommend that if 0.05 magnitude is going to be adequate for your needs, do the 2-minute solution for BVRcIc using J and K and forget about the other procedures. It's for a good reason that I assign the J and K procedure the name "Method #0" in the following list.