Overview
We're now part of the International Astronomical Search Collaboration - IASC - for this Fall's class. A pair of research-grade telescopes and CCD camera in Illinois will be taking images and placing them into an online folder where we have exclusive access to them for the purpose of measuring the positions of known asteroids and also discovering new ones! Important - You have only 48 hours from the time the images are placed in our folder to submit a report, because the candidate new object must be re-photographed within 7 days of the first images in order to be successfully recovered and a preliminary orbit calculated. Otherwise, it is considered "lost" and must be rediscovered anew by someone else. Since I see you only on Tuesday evenings, this project will be done as homework for each person individually in the class. Some of you may only have Apple computers at home. Since the Astrometrica software will only run on Windows machines, you must either install a Windows partition of your Mac machine (Bootcamp is what you want), or drop into room 705 when your schedule permits and do the searching there. Remember that a significant chunk of your grade has to do with work ethic and attitude. Dave McKulle and I talk frequently about which students are go-getters and show initiative and make good use of their lab time, and which students do not. This project is one which is an incredible opportunity, but requires initiative on your part. If you have problems, you can always email me and I will respond within hours (I'm on email frequently, every day). If I don't get reports from you, I can only assume you're not working on the project. One reward - anyone who discovers a genuine new asteroid gets an automatic minimum grade of "B" for the course! Such confirmation will happen only after MPC lets us know it's a new discovery; a couple of weeks after your report, or thereabouts. You need to turn in 4 completed, accurate MPC reports on 4 images sets in order to get full credit for this lab project. Your assignment is to analyze these images when they are posted, and make out an MPC Report (Minor Planet Center Report) showing the measured positions of every asteroid and asteroid candidate on the 3 images of the image set. Then to email that report to me. You may discover a new asteroid previously unknown, and if so, your reward will be acknowledgement on the IASC literature, prominent mention in local news (I'll let the local press know), an automatic minimum grade of "B" for the course, and maybe "fortune and glory"! (probably not this last, however). Depending on how many formal reports you submit in a timely way, you'll get scored on the points for this part of the class. High school classes from around the world have participated in this and made discoveries of new asteroids. No reason you can't too!
Check here every day, and follow the links below to see if there are new images to process. Remember, once new images show up, anyone in the class may access them and scoop you on the discovery if they do the work first, so check early and check often. Only the first person to send me a valid discovery gets the discovery credit. The current 45 day campaign is the one which includes Cabrillo College and runs through Oct 7 only! Once you fill out your report, check it, and send it to me, I do a quick check and then send it off to Patrick Miller - the director of IASC - who will do another check before sending it on to the Minor Planet Center. It's essential that the MPC not be sent false discoveries because once a possible discovery is made, big telescopes are put on the job of making new photos and new people are assigned to followup and get more positions so that an accurate orbit can be calculated - and they don't want to waste time and resources on bogus reports.
Getting Started
First of all - you need a Windows machine. Astrometrica does not have a Mac version.
Installing Astrometrica on your computer.
And Now Do This Every Day...
Using Astrometrica Each Day to Search / Discover Asteroids
What if you make a Genuine New Discovery?
Discoveries, confirmations of NEO's etc are shown on the IASC page, also linked here. You can see that Dr. Rick has already been hard at work and made some good confirmations of new KILLER ASTEROIDS. You could help SAVE the PLANET too! But you have to be quick! Read near the bottom of this link, on the Minor Planet Center site, to see how names of new asteroids are assigned.