Extra Extra! Extra Data Stream Added to the Daily Minor Planet!
The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is growing! In addition to the data received each night from the Catalina Sky Survey’s Mount Lemmon Telescope in Arizona, the project’s science team is currently processing images from the Kitt Peak National Observatory’s 2.3-meter Bok Telescope. The Bok is a powerful telescope operated by the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory that is used to study new near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids that pass through Earth’s orbit.
The data from the Bok telescope go further than those from the Mount Lemmon telescope: they reveal objects about two to three times fainter. Software often struggles with such faint objects, but humans excel at pattern recognition in this type of data, making your contributions to this research more valuable than ever.
Another important feature of the new data is that it comes primarily from the ecliptic, the band of sky where asteroids and comets preferentially travel. The project team expects this deeper, ecliptic-centered coverage to significantly increase the number of main-belt asteroids it can recover and confirm and bring new waves of near-Earth asteroid candidates.
Keep an eye out for new Bok topic sets as they are added. They will be a little more difficult and a lot more rewarding!
The Daily Minor Planet is a regularly updated citizen science project hosted by the Zooniverse using nightly data collected by the Catalina Sky Survey. Anyone with a laptop or smartphone can participate.
