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Every day asteroids make close approaches of our planets. The majority narrowly miss our planet, but occasionally a few impact our atmosphere and explode, help us capture the data with a CMOS camera.
Completed Project: Monitoring Near Earth Asteroids
These objects (often faint with mV > 17) are non trivial to observe due to their rapid movement with respect to “fixed” stars. The movement itself implies that the photons don’t get accumulated in the same pixels limiting the advantage of image stacking.
A larger telescope (such as the Perren) allows us to detect and monitor many more and fainter objects. One such object (162082) of 500m in size is shown in a single 60s frame and in a differential sequence of 4 frames, passing at 16 Lunar distances from us in October 2019.
Deep sky integration. How to improve: Lucky Imaging
Seeing is the result of atmospheric turbulence varying the light trajectory and ultimately the destination on the CCD.Taking many, very fast images (short exposures) reduces the amount of 1/f (longer drift) component noise therefore resulting in a sharper image. Potentially this would mean taking ~1000 frames instead of 10 resulting in a substantially higher quality image.
The Future:
Detailed measurement of asteroid diameters and shapes can be obtained through high-precision timing of occultations performed from multiple sites as the “umbra” section of the stellar eclipse will having different timings on different sites on Earth depending on location.
This can be achieved with a high speed readout CMOS camera. Fast readout (>40 fps) high dynamic range cameras (scientific Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor or sCMOS)
