I would like to find a telescope picture of a certain asteroid, where I know the exact number and entry on the Minor Planet Center.
As an example, here is an entry of a similar asteroid (not the exact one I’m looking for, just an example).
There is a long list of observations listed for the asteroid. The example goes up to the year 2019. “Mine” even has more than a hundred listed observations listed for 2020.
Isn’t it true that most, or perhaps all of the listed observations are in fact telescope pictures made by someone at some time?
Are (some of) these available on the internet somewhere? How do I find them?
E.g. 703 – Catalina Sky Survey is listed as one source of observations, are these ones (or any other) available for download somewhere? Such that I can see which one has “my” asteroid and where in the image it is?
I don’t think there is any archive of asteroid photos, because a photo of an asteroid doesn’t provide any information beyond what’s in the database. It’ll just be a dim star where a star usually isn’t. The only information contained in the photo is the apparent position and brightness of the asteroid at the time of observation.
That asteroid was discovered by the OCA–DLR Asteroid Survey (ODAS) (and was apparently a rediscovery of an asteroid already recorded as 1985 DT1.) Hereare a couple of abstracts about how they did their work. (Their website appears to be dead.)
If you wanted, you could probably look at the orbital parameters, then check any on-line sky surveys (with imaging down to 13th magnitude) for a specific date and time that it should be in view.
Precovery. (Which makes no sense considering that finding it isn’t called covery and later observations aren’t called postcovery and goes to prove that astronomers aren’t linguists.)
It appears the minorplanetcenter.net database contains the asteroid’s position at the time of each observation. You should be able to input the coordinates from SDSS observations into the SDSS skyserver and get more info about the observation. I have no experience using SDSS myself to offer any advice, sorry.
I think that’s right. The SDSS captures the different colors sequentially, so any object that is moving relative to the stars (like an asteroid) would have smeared colors like that. (I.e. the asteroid has moved between the time the telescope has taken the red image and the green image, etc).
Yeah, if you want an interesting picture, you’re out of luck. Here’s a set of pictures of Ceres, taken by the Hubble. That’s the largest by far of the asteroids, taken through one of the best telescopes humanity has available, specifically trying to deliberately get the best pictures it can of that specific object, and you can still only just barely make out any surface details. Your asteroid, by comparison, is so insignificant that over 16 thousand other asteroids were discovered before it.
Aside: Birthday present, for someone who was born on the same day it was discovered?
Ceres is almost 1000 km in diameter. 16007 is somewhere between 4 and 10 km in diameter, judging from the brightness. Even if you were to point the Hubble Space Telescope to it, it would be less than 1/10 of a pixel wide.
And Ceres at its dimmest (Mag 9.3) is 30 times brighter than the Mag 13 asteroid. (But the Hubble image was probably taken around maximum brightness for Ceres, which is more than 300 times brighter than 16007.)
Thanks all, I’m very happy with how my picture turned out! It was in fact a birthday present. I stitched together a bunch of screenshots taken from that direct navigator link (printed nicely as inverted images) and I think it turned out really impressive.
As a little follow up, does anybody know good free “planetarium” site that would plot that asteroid over time against the celestial sphere? I can find sites that plot “the sky” as seen from a given spot on earth, but I would prefer just giving celestial coordinates (RA,dec), like in my picture when that thing was in Aries (close to Alpha Arietis). Google Sky is great but can it plot an asteroid? Or another site like it? Thanks again all.
Thanks, great tip! Installed it and trying it now.
Right off the bat I got it to show a close up of grassy ground (it started up showing some daytime landscape). But I’m studying now how to turn all that off and get to the good stuff
Success!! Just press F4, turn off Earth Surface and Atmosphere checkboxes and it works. (My machine by default shows the UI in the local language, dunno what this would be in English.)
It has very few asteroids installed as standard, but easy enough to import (the needed bits of) the MPC Asteroid Catalog through the Solar System Editor setting.
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