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, July 10, 2010

M16 2010-July-09


Fairly noisy single 5 minutes frame taken at 28 C.
Since the camera doesn't have anti-blooming gates, some stars saturate the pixels and the electrons in excess spill over to create the vertical bars seen in the brightest stars.
Anti blooming gates are not desirable when the aim is to produce quality photometry, saturated stars become readily apparent and shouldn't be used for the photometric solution.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

La Cañada 2010 July 06, comet P/2010 A5 (LINEAR)

A stack of 12 exposures two minutes each.
Logarithmic scaled, false color rendition.
Original unprocessed stacked frame.
Juan Lacruz, La Cañada 2010 July 06, 21:52:27.7 UT

Monday, July 5, 2010

NEO Confirmation 2010 NG

An object posted on MPCs NEOCP was confirmed on a stack of images taken remotely from Madrid on 2010 July 04. Moving at 6 arc seconds per minute at magnitud 19V didn't seem an easy object however the night was clear enough to allow an early detection with small residuals. Because the resulting plate scale of the telescope + CCD system is about 1.2 arc seconds per pixel, the exposure used was 10 seconds per frame, short enough to prevent the asteroid drift.

This case highlights the different classification scheme used by different organitazions. Having a semimajor axis a = 1.533 and perihelion distance q = 1.005, 2010 NG is Amor for the MPC and Apollo for the JPL.

The MPC NEO classes :

Atens have semimajor axes, a, less than 1 AU;

Apollos have semimajor axes, a, greater than 1 AU, and perihelion distances, q, less than 1 AU;

Amors have perihelion distances between 1 and 1.3 AU.

The JPL Orbits classes :

Aten Near-Earth asteroid orbits similar to that of 2062 Aten (a < 1.0 AU; Q > 0.983 AU).

Apollo Near-Earth asteroid orbits which cross the Earth's orbit similar to that of 1862 Apollo (a > 1.0 AU; q < 1.017 AU).

Amor Near-Earth asteroid orbits similar to that of 1221 Amor (a > 1.0 AU; 1.017 < q < 1.3 AU).

Reference : MPEC 2010-N15

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.