asteroids

Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun in our Solar System, but are too small to be considered planets. They are in fact, commonly known as Minor Planets due to their size. The majority of the asteroids in our Solar System orbit the Sun in what we call the ‘Asteroid Belt’. This is located between Mars and Jupiter as can be seen in the diagram below.   read more »

Asteroids are impossible to spot in single images so we need to use software to find them. To identify an asteroid, we have to catch it moving. This article will show you how to you a free piece of software called astrometrica to do this.  read more »

Astrometrica is a simple to use Windows application which will read in raw telescope data (FITS files) for a set of observations, and check to see if there are any moving objects in them. You can ‘blink’ data files to see the object moving, mark its name if its know about, and even report a new asteroid to the Minor Planets Center.  read more »

Asteroids are awkward; they don’t stay in one place!  Not only that, as the Earth rotates, different asteroids are visible from the Earth at different times.  You might therefore think that finding the position of an asteroid in the sky might be a difficult task.  Fortunately, much of the difficult work has already been done by various groups of people, and it is not as difficult as you might imagine finding the co-ordinates of an asteroid in the sky.  You will need to follow these instructions on the same day as your observing session.  read more »