Discovering Asteroids or Comets in Your Image Data

[avandonk]

I noticed three moving objects in an image of Rho Ophiuchus. Thread here.

The give away is the RGB track. Cosmic rays will only affect one frame and produce a mono coloured track.

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=104596
Here is the image with three RGB trails. 10MB
http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/RHO_O_RGB.jpg (http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/RHO_O_RGB.jpg)
The only reason these tracks show up is that the objects are moving slowly enough to record on more than one consecutive frame at the same pixel position.
On reflection I decided to stack the data using the maximum for averaging rather than median sigma reject.

Sure enough another two objects appeared that were moving faster.
Image here 15MB
http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAX_ (http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAX_.jpg).jpg (http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAX_.jpg)

The slow moving dim one was now almost lost in the noise.
I combined these two images using max setting and all five objects are now quite clear! 13MB
http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAX_med&max.jpg

I cannot find any of these on StarryNightPro.
I am sure there are people out there that know more about identifying asteroids than I do.

Here is a large map 9MB
http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAP.jpg

The images were taken from 2AM to 6AM Melbourne time on 13_03_2013. My location is in my public profile.


Bert

[thunderchildobs]

Try the Minor Planet Checker

http://scully.cfa.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/checkmp.cgi

[PeterM]

“Vermin of the sky,” was the phrase many astronomers attributed to asteroids as recently as the 1970s and 1980s.
A quick search finds stacks of faint asteroids in the area. The brighter ones include 257Silesia mag15.5, 937Bethega mag15.8, 3999Aristarchus mag16.9, 322Murayama mag17.6 So now the detective work, which is which?
Good pick up Bert.

[avandonk]

Here is a map I made with black spots just to the left of all SIX asteroids in this image. Vermin indeed.

It has to be this big to see the tracks clearly 17MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2013_03/MAP2.jpg


From the top

Augusta, Aristarchus, Ekard, Bethgea, unknown and Silesia


Lacadiera is just out of the image field.


The following objects, brighter than V = 17.0, were found in the 150.0-arcminute region around R.A. = 16 25, Decl. = -23 26 (J2000.0) on 2013 03 12.71 UT:
Object designation R.A. Decl. V Offsets Motion/hr Orbit Further observations? (http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/info/FurtherObs.html)
h m s ° ' " R.A. Decl. R.A. Decl. Comment (Elong/Decl/V at date 1)

(937) Bethgea 16 25 03.7 -23 26 14 15.8 0.8E 0.2S 38+ 4- 31o None needed at this time.
(254) Augusta 16 23 41.7 -22 41 19 15.8 18.0W 44.7N 42+ 13- 30o None needed at this time.
(3999) Aristarchus 16 24 15.4 -24 38 26 16.9 10.2W 72.4S 25+ 6- 21o None needed at this time.
(694) Ekard 16 20 16.3 -22 41 15 14.2 65.1W 44.7N 21+ 5+ 41o None needed at this time.
P/2003 SQ215 (NEAT-L 16 18 56.2 -23 11 48 83.4W 14.2N 0+ 0- .0 o (r = 7.68 AU)
(257) Silesia 16 31 40.4 -23 13 46 15.5 91.8E 12.2N 12+ 4- 49o None needed at this time.
55P/Tempel-Tuttle 16 19 26.7 -24 20 57 76.5W 55.0S 2- 0+ .0 o (r = 19.59 AU)
(336) Lacadiera 16 34 01.6 -23 33 03 13.7 124.2E 7.0S 41+ 1- 43o None needed at this time.


Number of objects checked = 553985
Bert

[avandonk]

Thanks for the info

I actually got it to work for me.

Bert

[mithrandir]

Bert, I plate solved it with astrometry.net, displayed the generated FITS in CdC and got this, with Tycho and UCAC4 cats not displayed. I've only got about 17000 minors loaded. I don't think the parallax error for my Sydney location can be much.