Galaxy Zoo Talk

3 asteroids

  • jstoke by jstoke

    This may, or may not, be helpful ... but I went to skyserver to check for nearby objects to account for the stream of debris. I increased the size to 2048 x 2048 pixels and zoomed in by one (scale .39612 "/pix). When I scrolled all the way down, and all the way to the right, there appear to be three asteroids in that area. If this is of interest, and my instructions are not adequate to locate the 3 objects, post here and I'll take the time to tweak the RA and DEC until I have the exact coordinates of all three. I wonder, with the age of these images, are the asteroids even relocatable? Oh, and, will they hit our planet? (Just kidding, I hear most of the big ones have known orbits and we're fairly safe for the immediate future.)

    http://skyserver.sdss3.org/dr8/en/tools/chart/chart.asp?ra=32.30849641&dec=4.98879922

    Posted

  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    Hi jstoke,
    There are lots of asteroids in these SDSS images, but finding 3 close together is special.

    As I understand it, these images are scanned for asteroids, but obviously the software will miss some of them. I've been looking around on the SDSS site but I couldn't find if there's a list of found asteroids.

    Here's a link to some research that has been done : http://skyserver.sdss3.org/dr8/en/sdss/discoveries/discoveries.asp

    Happy hunting

    Els

    Posted

  • jstoke by jstoke in response to ElisabethB's comment.

    Thank you for the link. That was a very interesting article. If I understood it correctly, automated image analysis has already identified 10,000 asteroids in the SDSS data, and there could be as many as 90,000 more for us to spot and tag. I love finding them and will keep looking and tagging.

    Posted