Extra data stream added to the Daily Minor Planet

The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is expanding its data sources. In addition to nightly images from the Catalina Sky Survey's Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona, the team is now processing images from the Bok 2.3-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a University of Arizona Steward Observatory instrument used to survey for new near-Earth objects that cross Earth’s orbit.

Images from the Bok telescope reach deeper than those from Mt. Lemmon, revealing objects roughly two to three times as faint. Software often struggles with such faint targets, while human classifiers excel at spotting the patterns these images contain, making volunteer contributions especially valuable.

Most of the new Bok data come from the ecliptic, the band of sky where asteroids and comets preferentially travel. The project team expects this deeper, ecliptic-focused coverage to substantially increase the number of main-belt asteroids they can recover and confirm and to produce fresh waves of near-Earth asteroid candidates.

United States, Arizona

daily minor, catalina survey, mt lemmon, bok telescope, kitt peak, steward observatory, near earth, main belt, ecliptic, citizen science