The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is expanding! In addition to data received nightly from the Catalina Sky Survey’s Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona, the project’s science team is now processing images from the Bok 2.3-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The Bok is a mighty telescope run by the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory that is used to survey for new near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit.
Data from the Bok telescope peers deeper than the data from the Mt. Lemmon telescope–it reveals objects roughly two to three times as faint. Software often struggles with such faint objects, but humans shine at pattern recognition in this kind of data, making your contributions to this search more valuable than ever.
Another important feature of the new data is that it mostly comes 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 bring fresh waves of near-Earth asteroid candidates.
Keep an eye out for new Bok subject sets as they are added. They’ll be a little more challenging 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 join.
