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).



Monday, August 29, 2011

La Cañada, 2011-08-26&27 FollowUp and recovery. Performance statistics

Following up the two recent discoveries : Asteroids  2011 OJ18 and 2011 OX27 I've found a new unidentified one which I sent to the MPC with the observatory designation LC00233, this turned out to be the recovery of a main belt asteroid discovered in 2007, LC00233 (K07R24J.

A view of the control room, two PCs are used, the one on the left to control the wheather station and the one on the right, controlling the telescope, camera and focuser as well as the dome's slit.

The 40cm RCT F10 telescope with the focuser, adaptive optics and camera attached.

Photos : José Ramón Camblor.

One of the observatoruy goals is to achieve the lowest possible residuals in the astrometric and photometric observations, the MPC publishes the number statistics of astrometric observations per observatory and year, below you can see the graph of these, with a very clear tendency towards minimum dispersion, in the year 2010 the dispersion was +/-034 arc seconds in RA and +/-0.35 in DEC which seems to be near the limits imposed by the average atmospheric seeing of the location.