Rob McNaughts 33rd!

[Outbackmanyep]

I dunno if theres already been a thread on here, but on the 20th April Rob McNaught discovered #33 and has become the astronomer with most comet discoveries to his name, passing Gene Shoemaker......

Well done again Rob! :thumbsup:

[matt]

Well done, Rob:thumbsup:

Enjoyed your article in the current AS&T

[iceman]

What a great achievement! I look forward to meeting him and hearing him speak at BSG2007!

[Ric]

Congrats to Rob, an excellent achievement.

Cheers

[rogerg]

That's a darn good effort. I have to admit I wouldn't have known what number is considered high or low for a professional, but comparing it to the previous best...

:thumbsup:

[spacezebra]

Looking forward to meeting him too!



Cheers Petra

[maksutover]

thats amazing! good to know were leading the world in comet discoveries!

[fringe_dweller]

er that would have to go to the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project/automated sky survey - 142 comets

http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/

- who have been interestingly quiet for a while now ..hmmm..

yet another amazing achievment tho for Rob, he must be getting bored of breaking records? lol :P

I am always most impressed by the visual comet discovery record of Bill Bradfield (south aussie), which will probably stand for all time now :eyepop:

[higginsdj]

Not taking anything away from Rob and his tireless work, I am amazed why they aren't being named for the Catalina Sky Survey. (I thought they were funding his work)

Cheers

[fringe_dweller]

agreed, that was not my intention



true, and it gets even more confusing when you Gordon and Rob combined under SidingSprings :shrug: lol oh well - I am glad the discovers personally are getting credit now and not just the boring old surveys name on them

we have a few hundred SOHO's not to mention, wonder how many STEREO'
s theres gonna be :eyepop: 10 years time> 1000?! :P

[h0ughy]

A great achievement, and hopefully it could be like his last discovery?

[Rob_K]

Ephemeris for McNaught C/2007 H1 is at:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/2007H1_1.html

V faint now at mag 16.1 and will peak at mag 15.1 in August/September.:(

Cheers -

[loomberah]

only when we tell the MPC at the time of the discovery report that it is a comet. Otherwise for us it will just be called C/Siding Spring, I have a couple of them as well as 5 called C/ or P/Garradd.
If it is just a moving star-like point on our images, like a typical asteroid, we just report it as an asteroid, and if the motion looks like a main belt asteroid, or at least nothing too far out of the ordinary, then it is just reported with the general astrometry and is left in the one night stands file at the MPC. It could remain there until the MPC link it with another night, or else someone independently discovers it and reports it as a comet, preferably with follow up observations (that will allow the orbit to be linked to any earlier observations).

cheers, Gordon

[fringe_dweller]

ahh, no coma or rough orbit fit, no dice, gotchya,
now that you explained that, I think I remember reading you guys explain this procedure on the ml or somwhere? recently.
Anyway it's interesting stuff, thanks for clearing that up Gordon! appreciate it :) :thumbsup:
and happy hunting!

[higginsdj]

Gordon, do you and Robert have to personally identify all moving objects in the survey or do you have software that does it like LINEAR?

Cheers

[loomberah]

The software IDs what it thinks are moving objects, but most of that is noise, hot pixels, cosmic rays, alignments of stars, ghost reflections of stars, edges of star haloes, galaxies etc, so we have to look through all that and validate what is real by eye. Anything that gets a high rating in the software (which all the non-real objects generally do) and looks to be real, we check if its a known object, either from known asteroids in MPCOrb.dat, or on the MPCs asteroid checker page. Sometimes interesting objects have very low ratings, but they have a coma or tail such as P/2007 H3 ;)
So, in a typical night we might look at thousands of non-real "detections" and anything from zero to thousands of real objects, depending on where in the sky we are searching.

cheers, Gordon

[higginsdj]

I don't envy you that job though the fringe benefits are good :-)

[loomberah]

The hours suck a bit though... especially in winter!

[Outbackmanyep]

How many is that for you Gordon??

Are you and Rob having bets like the shearers do in the shed?? Hehe

Cheers!

[loomberah]

I'm up to 5 with my name on them now, plus a handful of Siding Spring ones that didn't look like comets when I found them.
Not much chance I will catch Rob, although I'm 3:1 ahead this year ;)

[Outbackmanyep]

Woohoo!
You guys are doing a terrific job, i guess there not much more room to improve with the routine you have ....obviously it works and works well!

How much more difficult is it to detect comets due to moonlight?

[loomberah]

Its all good if we have mostly clear skies! but we cant cover the entire southern sky (minus crowded Milky Way areas) each month if we get a lot of cloudy nights. We generally don't operate 3 nights either side of FM, as productivity is way down due to the bight sky. Dark skies are obviously better for detecting a faint coma, so if theres a bright moon up it will definitely reduce our chances of detecting it. Keep in mind that we only do 20 or 30 sec exposures, so very faint comas wont always be obvious anyway.

cheers, Gordon

[Outbackmanyep]

I wouldnt mind saying hello next time im out at Siding Spring, unless you're too busy during the daytime, i am planning to go out there sometime in July to hopefully tour the mountain and have a look at the buildings......would be great to catch up for a chat!

[loomberah]

I'll be around about half the time in July, Rob will be away most of the month on holiday. I generally go mountain biking during the afternoons, after sleeping in the mornings, but if its crappy weather I'll probably be on the mountain. Give me plenty of notice and I'm sure we can arrange something. At the moment ANU are planning to close the visitor centre down at the end of May, I'm not sure what, if anything, they plan on doing about public access after that.

cheers, gordon

[CometGuy]

Gordon,

I've got a couple of questions about the Siding Spring survey :)

Are there any plans to go to smaller solar elongations with the survey? I notice you guys don't tend to go in much less than 60 degrees from the sun on the coverage charts.

Somebody asked me the other day whether you and Rob automated detection software for minor planets/comets, but I assumed you still scanned the images by eye. Is this true?

Terry

[loomberah]

Hi Terry, we sometimes go closer to the sun, but small elongations have the problem of making it more difficult to get follow up observations on the same night, as well as the limiting magnitude being brighter near the horizon. I like to operate as high as possible above the horizon where the seeing is better and the extinction is less in order to go deeper. So, now you know where to look for comets ;)

As I think I mentioned in a previous post, the software presents us with a list of what it thinks might be moving objects, and we visually inspect everything in the list to see if it is real or not. The vast majority of the detections are not real objects, and if its a bunch of dozens or hundreds of detections around a bright star, we have a command to allow regions of the image to be excluded from the list, so we don't waste too much time looking at noise.


cheers, Gordon

[Outbackmanyep]

Thanks Gordon,
I'll PM you when the time gets closer, its frustrating to hear that they're closing the visitors centre down, i have been waiting for an opportunity to tour the mountain and just like governments they move the goalposts again!
I'll keep in touch!
You dont live too far away from me!
Do you know where Walcha is??
Cheers!

[loomberah]

The last (ever?) public tour of the mountain was a couple of weeks ago, I heard about 50 people turned up for it.

Yes I know where Walcha is ;) been there plenty of times over the past ~30 years!

cheers, Gordon