Wednesday 10 December 2008

Bad weather

Bad weather and midwinter situations leading to only a very short observation window right after dusk are the main reasons why observing has come to a stop at the moment. I haven't been able to observe since November 29th, which itself was preceded by a period of forced non-observation due to the weather.

This means I spent some time hunting asteroids again in archive imagery of the NEAT project. It was (and is) a rather prolific stint of asteroid hunting, yielding the following new designations (with a few datasets still pending):

tmp. desig.
2002 PN188
2002 WQ27
2001 SD355
2002 WR27
2002 XK118
2002 UU76
2002 WV27
2002 WW27
2002 WX27


For a complete list of my discoveries, see here.

Two of the new discoveries (2001 SD355 and 2002 WV27) are Jovian Trojans moving in the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of Jupiter, 60 degrees on either side of it, sharing the planet's orbit. It are my first trojan discoveries.

In total I now discovered one Near Earth Asteroid (in the Spacewatch FMO program) and (in the NEAT archives) two Trojans and 22 main belt asteroids.

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