Amateur asteroid search

Last month astronomers were thrilled by the confirmation that a second known interstellar object is flying through our solar system. Gennady Borisov spotted the object with a homemade 0. And almost immediately, other astronomers, both professional and amateur, began training their own telescopes on it. The trajectory of the comet confirmed it was unbound from our sun and therefore hailed from another star system.

Recent advances in software have brought asteroid identification within the reach of amateur users with computerized telescopes and ccd imagers. Sample scripts provided with these products allow the user to be up and running immediately. More importantly, these products surface their devices as ActiveX objects, which can be controlled not only by scripting languages like VBScript or JavaScript , but also from programming languages like Visual Basic or my personal favorite Delphi. They can even be controlled from Microsoft Word or Excel! The telescope is set up normally, aligned, and synchronized in the normal fashion. The ccd imager is installed and focused in the same general portion of the sky that the user wants to image. The user runs the script included with Astronomer's Control Panel ACP or runs a custom program to read the list of objects and steer the telescope to the first object.

In December , the leaders of seven national amateur astronomy organizations met at STScI in Baltimore to discuss the participation of amateur astronomers in the HST project. The team used the Hubble Space Telescope to perform a spectroscopic search for OH emission from five asteroids. OH emission would indicate that the asteroids were once comets.

A team of amateur astronomers has discovered a previously unknown asteroid in orbit that brings it near the Earth, highlighting the contributions regular folks can make to planetary defense, scientists announced Wednesday Oct. The skywatchers spotted the asteroid, which is known as SF, in September using a telescope in the Canary Islands. While SF's orbit appears to bring it no closer to Earth than about 18 million miles 30 million kilometers , it still qualifies as a near-Earth object — the class of space rocks that could pose a danger to our planet.