La Cañada Observatory, is an initiative by Juan Lacruz, the observatory started astrometric operations in the summer of 2002, it is registered as station J87 in the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.

The Observatory also participates in the studies on minor bodies promoted by the Group on Meteorites, Minor Bodies, and Planetary Sciences of the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC).



Saturday, June 19, 2010

La Cañada, 2010 June 19, Comet McNaught

30 seconds ISO 1600, 200mm F2.8
Cropped image

Same exposure parameters as above
cropped and downsized frame
This is a composition of 24 frames of 30 seconds each stacked on the comet's movement.
The comet rises low in the horizon short before the sunrise.
LX200R F10 + SBIG STL 1001E
2010 June 19 at 19:03 UT

Monday, June 7, 2010

2010 June 06, NEO confirmations

The night of the Sunday 06 june 2010, working remotely from Madrid, I contributed to the confirmation of two objects posted on the MPC's NEO confirmation page (NEOCP), one of them (TAL 601) was moving quite fast, at about 4"/sec, allowing only short exposures max 20 seconds :

TAL 601 = 2010 LN14 Apollo object

Reference : MPEC 2010-L30

SW40jD = 2010 LJ14 This is an amor object, it grazes the Earth's orbit at a periheion of 1.1 AU, see the orbit diagram at JPL orbits

Reference : MPEC 2010-L27

Also, previous confirmation work, conducted on the site on June 5 and 4 :

RL2C068 = 2010 CL17 This resulted to be a a main belt asteroid.
RL2B422 According to the MPC this was not a minor planet, however I didn't find any object around the predicted position, also strange how this object didn't have uncertainty map pusblished in the NEOCP as usual.