A view of the Main Belt
Being a trained artist, I liked to paint asteroids that were imaged by spacecraft. Starting with Galileo's flyby of Asteroid Ida, each time a spacecraft would image an asteroid, I would paint it based on close-up images.
A few years after I moved to New Delhi, I heard from the educator at the Nehru Planetarium that a 17 or 18-magnitude asteroid would be coming to a good Opposition and a would be a good target for photometry as suggested by Prof. Tom Gehrels of University of Arizona. Though I was not interested in observing these asteroids, I came in touch with Prof. Gehrels, which is a very important event of my life.
A view of the Main Belt
In September 1999, Prof. Gehrels visited New Delhi and gave a talk at the Nehru Planetarium about the Universe. I attended the lecture as a journalist to report about it for my newspaper.
After the lecture, I had a chance to personally interact with Prof. Gehrels who gave me a crash course on Near-earth asteroids and the threats they pose. Having got my story, I got a chance to drop Prof. Gehrels at his hotel in a cab. During the course of our talk, I casually asked him about the kind of asteroid research being done in India. He said that there were no asteroid surveys in India although she has large astronomical observatories.
Realising a possible chance for amateur contribution in this area, I quickly proposed to him, "What if I start an observatory here and do follow-up observations of NEOs." He thought for a while and said, "That would be a great thing for India. You will be great man if you could do that." Elated by his response, I quickly thought of what all needs to be done... telescope... CCD... dark skies...
After we reached his hotel, he got out of the cab and said, "A lot of people have told me this, no one has so far done anything about it."
In the meanwhile, I made friends with Kyle Smalley, a retired nuclear reactor engineer who worked on US submarines. Kyle was interested in asteroids and had started observing asteroids with his club's 30-inch telescope from Powell Observatory, near Kansas City, USA. Kyle started observing asteroids 6 months ago and had tonnes of patience answering my stupid questions. He helped me download a free astrometry software called Charon (pronounced as Kai-ron) and sent me 3 CCD images of an asteroid which he had observed so that I could practise as I neither had CCD nor a good telescope.
Kyle Smalley presents paper at the Minor Planet Workshop.
Kyle, who started as an amateur astronomer, is now employed at the Minor Planet Center.
From the start, Charon was not easy to learn. The software was DOS-based and it took me good three months to make the whole thing work. After practically learning how to do astrometry, I was up against anything to set up an observatory here in India and start observing.
I had a 16-inch blank which could be made into a telescope and after doing some rough estimate I realised that I would need at least Rs 2 lakhs to set up an observatory with a CCD camera. But with such kind of money the observatory would take two years or more to complete.
I decided to raise some funds with the help of "rich" relatives and friends. But I failed to convince the importance of asteroid research. I visited a close by professional observatory and spoke to the director about my project. He was convinced that I was serious about it and told me that I could use a 15-inch f/15 Cassegrain with an Sbig ST-7 CCD camera provided I get someone to guide me. But the observatory was more than a day's journey from New Delhi and asteroid observing needs at least 2 nights in a row and every week, something that was not possible with my current job.
I decided to take 3 months off during that winter and observe continuously. I returned to Delhi and made detailed plans for the 3 months to come in winter.
Gregg with my telescope.
Anyway, I finally managed to raise the $3,000 for the telescope with the help of Mr T.M. Kumar of New Delhi. The telescope took good 6 months to get through shipping and customs and finally arrived in March 2002.
After paying the import duty, I had little money to buy a CCD camera.
In the meanwhile, I spent a lot of money and applied for the Planetary Society's Shoemaker Grant in order to buy a CCD camera. But the proposal didn't make it and I was left without a camera. In the meanwhile, with the help of a friend, I completed a roll-off-roof observatory. But due to weird Municipal building laws in Delhi, I was unable to put it. At one point, the police landed up after a mad neighbour complained!
With out a CCD camera and an observatory, my dream of discovering an asteroid seemed difficult.
I also planned to visit well-known asteroid-hunter Roy A. Tucker of Arizona, whom I knew again through Yahoo! Roy, a professional CCD instrumentation engineer, holds a world record for maximum number of near-earth asteroid discoveries by an amateur astronomer. Besides, he has also discovered a comet and over 200 main-belt asteroids.
Roy's observatory in Tucson.
With $200 in pocket, I took a 3-day bus journey from Michigan to Arizona in the last week of June. The bus went through 7 states arriving in Tucson 10 hours late! But thankfully, Roy was there waiting for me at the bus station. Tucson is an astronomer's paradise with over 300 clear nights a year and minimum light pollution. A desert city, Tucson clime reminded me of India and I felt at home.
After hazy skies, during the first few days, I finally got a chance to observe under good skies on the June 28.
The instrument I was using is called MOTESS - Moving Object Transient
Event Search System. More about MOTESS at:
http://gpobs.home.mindspring.com/gpobs.htm
On any given night, the three 14-inch F/5 telescopes collect 150 triplets-3 images of the same field. After the images are collected in the night, each image is processed and then the triplets are blinked to detect asteroids. As my luck would have it, the Opposition region was right in the Milkyway where the asteroids are brightest. Besides, summer time is considered the worst time to discover asteroids.
MOTESS prepares for another asteroid hunting night.
Unlike normal images that have comparatively less stars, Milkyway fields are full of stars and asteroids are difficult to detect among these thousands of stars. Here is what happens on a typical night. The MOTESS system is an automatic image-collector. Just switch it on in the evening and the scopes collect the images automatically till 6 am. Then you take dark frames and shut down the scopes before sunrise. Since the images are taken in scan-mode, a second computer cuts these scans and arranges them into triplets, i.e. same image from each telescope is taken at 15-minute interval are made into triplets for blinking.
Then another programme puts the correct RA information into the fits header for all the 150 triplets, after which we process the images for dark and flat field using Maxim DL.
Next process is to plate solve the images during which a star catalogue is used for adding RA and DEC information of each star in every image so that we can get the position of the asteroid in comparison to the stars. This takes about 3 hours, and by 12 in the afternoon the images are ready for blinking. Using a software called PinPoint we take the 3 images of a triplet and blink, then look for objects that move and do astrometry for them. A single triplet takes about 10 minutes to blink so you can get the picture about blinking 150 triplets. I start at around 12 noon, finish the whole lot buy 4 am the next morning. Easy said than done...The first day I was in Tucson, Roy gave me some images which he had taken 2 years ago with his C14 telescope and asked me to look for asteroids. Boy! I found tonnes of them, all cosmic ray fakes! But that was a great lesson. Since the skies were bad, I worked a lot on these images and learned how to find and identify asteroids. Most of the asteroids in these images were really bright, about 18 magnitude.
MOTESS control room
The skies cleared a bit on June 28 and we got some good images in the early part of the evening. I got about 28 good triplets, found 5 objects and then waited for the second night. 29th was clear relatively and I got 2 nights on 3 of those 5 objects. Most of them were bright 17-18 magnitude so I knew for sure that they were known ones and I checked with the MPchecker on the Minor Planet Centre website and found that there was one 18.7 magnitude fellow with no earlier discovery credit. But for some reason, the second night astrometry was noisy and I didn't get a credit. Bad luck!
With Jeff Larson at Spacewatch.
30th too was terribly cloudy so I went up to Kitt Peak with Roy and had a great time there looking at all the big telescopes we read in Sky and Telescope. Jeff Larson at Spacewatch was really nice to us and he knew about me from Prof. Tom Gehrels. In fact, Jeff offered me and Roy to stay back for the night and watch Spacewatch in action.
After coming back from Kitt Peak, we went and met Prof. Tom Geherls at the University of Arizona. He was happy to see that I had come all the way in search of asteroids.
At Kitt Peak.
After lunch, I gave Prof. Geherls some books that I had got from India and we went to University bookstore, as Prof. Geherls wanted to present me something. I always liked the Asteroids 2 book he wrote, which is now out of print. I asked for it to which he said that he had a personal copy, which he signed for me. Skies were bad that night so we just saw a few old images and hit the hay.
A few days later, on July 3, the sky cleared up and I got to see what Arizona skies were - deep blue skies with the brown desert below, really a great site. As the night fell, we started MOTESS and relaxed under the stars. I went off to sleep outside while Roy shut the cameras at 4 am.
Then he told me that he would get the images processed and keep them ready by 11 am so that I could take a look. But the next day was July 4, US Independence Day. An astronomer from the GNAT project came in the morning, so Roy couldn't process the images. I waited till 3 pm for the images to be plate-solved and dozed off while reading Clyde Tombaugh's (the discoverer of Pluto) autobiography by David Levy.
At 5.30 pm, Roy's friends came over for dinner. After a small talk, I got back to blinking. I wanted to finish 50 triplets before the dinner time but Roy asked me to join early so I stopped at 120, had a quick dinner and got back while they were watching Koyaanisquatsi (a great film) on video.
Since the Milkyway was more towards the midnight fields, the morning images were relatively easier with just a few hundred stars. At 7.30 pm Roy came to say hello and see how I was doing with the images. Just then I was getting into the Milkyway images so I said not too bad and I turned to the screen. Between the dark lanes, I found a faint but distinctly moving object. I knew it was an asteroid but I was in two minds over its status. I told Roy, "Oh not too bad, I have one here, did astrometry for the object and went on to more fields. A bit later, I found another object that was rather diffuse but moving N-S at an angle. Bang astrometry and went on. By the time I finished the Milkyway images, it was 2 am and I was exhausted, but I still had 30 triplets to go and wanted to finish them before dawn.
Sanath (the educator at Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi) gave me a brief company during those blinks through Yahoo! IM. By 4.30 am, I was too tired and stopped on the 12th triplet because those Milkyway images had made me feel sea sick with constant churning of stars across the field.
After shutting down the MOTESS, I went to bed and woke up at 11 am. Roy, in the meanwhile, sent my astrometry measurements to Gareth Williams at Minor Planet Centre, Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, USA, and got a reply giving the details of the object identification. You can see the report below:
Asteroid search run at 6/18/2002 10:57:01 PM Use File/Save As to save this file COD 683 CON Roy A. Tucker, 5500 West Nebraska Street, Tucson, AZ 85746 CON [gpobs@m...] OBS Vishnu Reddy MEA PinPoint Engine TEL 3 x (0.35-m f/5 Reflector + CCD) NET GSC-ACT VR0009 (06567 VR0009 * C2002 07 04.45549 23 24 39.78 +03 29 08.1 17.4 R 683 VR0009 C2002 07 04.46666 23 24 40.42 +03 29 13.0 17.6 R 683 VR0009 C2002 07 04.48008 23 24 41.29 +03 29 22.3 17.5 R 683 VR0010 (43560 VR0010 * C2002 07 04.44879 23 13 24.79 +03 16 41.3 17.6 R 683 VR0010 C2002 07 04.45996 23 13 25.40 +03 16 42.1 17.2 R 683 VR0010 C2002 07 04.47337 23 13 26.28 +03 16 41.4 17.4 R 683 VR0011 (06003 VR0011 * C2002 07 04.44433 23 07 37.65 +03 10 30.5 17.4 R 683 VR0011 C2002 07 04.45549 23 07 37.99 +03 10 32.6 17.2 R 683 VR0011 C2002 07 04.46890 23 07 38.34 +03 10 37.1 17.2 R 683 VR0012 (21559 VR0012 * C2002 07 04.43986 23 01 35.61 +03 36 42.3 18.7 R 683 VR0012 C2002 07 04.45103 23 01 35.50 +03 36 46.4 18.6 R 683 VR0012 C2002 07 04.46443 23 01 35.66 +03 36 50.3 20.1 R 683 VR0013 (23233 VR0013 * C2002 07 04.44209 23 03 16.68 +02 56 29.0 18.8 R 683 VR0013 C2002 07 04.45327 23 03 16.73 +02 56 36.0 18.8 R 683 VR0013 C2002 07 04.46666 23 03 16.23 +02 56 42.1 19.6 R 683 VR0014 (09996 VR0014 * C2002 07 04.43092 22 49 46.69 +03 09 02.5 17.7 R 683 VR0014 C2002 07 04.44209 22 49 47.07 +03 09 04.3 17.6 R 683 VR0014 C2002 07 04.45549 22 49 47.30 +03 09 10.0 17.7 R 683 VR0015 (J98U33B VR0015 * C2002 07 04.42869 22 44 47.19 +02 57 40.6 19.3 R 683 VR0015 C2002 07 04.43986 22 44 47.56 +02 57 43.3 19.2 R 683 VR0015 C2002 07 04.45327 22 44 47.84 +02 57 49.7 19.3 R 683 VR0016 (J99XD4G VR0016 * C2002 07 04.41752 22 28 43.50 +02 53 42.5 19.6 R 683 VR0016 C2002 07 04.42869 22 28 43.46 +02 53 51.4 19.1 R 683 VR0016 C2002 07 04.44209 22 28 43.31 +02 54 00.3 19.2 R 683 VR0017 * C2002 07 04.42199 22 18 06.94 +02 58 30.2 20.0 R 683 VR0017 C2002 07 04.43539 22 18 07.88 +02 58 23.7 20.5 R 683 VR0018 * C2002 07 04.41752 22 13 07.07 +03 10 44.4 20.2 R 683 VR0018 C2002 07 04.43092 22 13 07.63 +03 11 02.8 19.9 R 683 VR0019 (K00W49F VR0019 * C2002 07 04.38850 21 46 59.97 +03 08 22.0 19.0 R 683 VR0019 C2002 07 04.39966 21 46 59.82 +03 08 29.8 18.7 R 683 VR0019 C2002 07 04.41306 21 46 59.42 +03 08 41.2 18.7 R 683 VR0020 (J98SG2P VR0020 * C2002 07 04.37957 21 34 07.58 +03 01 32.9 18.6 R 683 VR0020 C2002 07 04.39074 21 34 07.37 +03 01 33.1 18.3 R 683 VR0020 C2002 07 04.40413 21 34 07.01 +03 01 36.3 18.5 R 683 VR0021 (K01Y04J VR0021 * C2002 07 04.37286 21 23 04.39 +03 12 46.2 17.7 R 683 VR0021 C2002 07 04.38402 21 23 03.34 +03 12 47.0 17.6 R 683 VR0021 C2002 07 04.39743 21 23 02.11 +03 12 47.2 17.7 R 683 VR0022 (K01E16P VR0022 * C2002 07 04.36392 21 12 14.28 +03 22 43.8 18.8 R 683 VR0022 C2002 07 04.37509 21 12 13.96 +03 22 42.0 18.7 R 683 VR0022 C2002 07 04.38850 21 12 13.56 +03 22 42.9 18.9 R 683 VR0023 (K00E20K VR0023 * C2002 07 04.36170 21 08 00.74 +02 56 09.2 17.9 R 683 VR0023 C2002 07 04.37286 21 08 00.43 +02 56 12.5 17.8 R 683 VR0023 C2002 07 04.38626 21 08 00.05 +02 56 16.9 18.1 R 683 VR0024 * C2002 07 04.35500 20 59 15.43 +02 58 34.7 19.1 R 683 VR0024 C2002 07 04.36615 20 59 15.21 +02 58 36.1 19.3 R 683 VR0024 C2002 07 04.37957 20 59 14.69 +02 58 40.1 19.6 R 683 VR0025 (25060 VR0025 * C2002 07 04.35723 21 02 12.43 +03 14 56.9 18.9 R 683 VR0025 C2002 07 04.36839 21 02 12.09 +03 14 59.4 18.8 R 683 VR0026 (J99V68D VR0026 * C2002 07 04.34607 20 47 24.10 +03 29 32.4 17.8 R 683 VR0026 C2002 07 04.37062 20 47 23.23 +03 29 37.8 17.9 R 683 VR0027 (00185 VR0027 * C2002 07 04.31703 20 04 29.05 +03 24 50.0 12.0 R 683 VR0027 C2002 07 04.32819 20 04 28.59 +03 24 47.6 11.9 R 683 VR0027 C2002 07 04.34159 20 04 27.89 +03 24 45.3 11.7 R 683 VR0028 * C2002 07 04.27012 18 57 05.27 +03 15 29.5 20.1 R 683 VR0028 C2002 07 04.28129 18 57 04.47 +03 15 30.3 19.8 R 683 VR0028 C2002 07 04.29470 18 57 03.80 +03 15 30.7 19.4 R 683 VR0029 (09827 VR0029 * C2002 07 04.26566 18 50 52.29 +03 14 18.6 17.9 R 683 VR0029 C2002 07 04.27683 18 50 51.87 +03 14 17.1 18.5 R 683 VR0029 C2002 07 04.29024 18 50 51.06 +03 14 18.3 17.8 R 683 VR0030 (01322 VR0030 * C2002 07 04.26789 18 52 09.27 +03 13 51.5 14.3 R 683 VR0030 C2002 07 04.27906 18 52 08.47 +03 14 04.3 14.3 R 683 VR0030 C2002 07 04.29246 18 52 07.63 +03 14 15.7 14.5 R 683If you notice, of all the 30 objects I found, there were 4 with no designations. So they might have been new ones. So I immediately started looking for those objects in last night's images. (To claim a discovery you need at least 2 nights of observations on a single object with 3 observations per night, actually it is more complex!) The first two VR0017 and VR0018 were fakes, just some cosmic ray impacts that I thought were asteroids! They were not there on the second night's images. Then I looked at VR0024, it was the one in the dark lane of the Milkyway so it was clearly there in the first night but I couldn't locate in the second night. Disappointed, I went to VR0028. Bang! There it was, the diffuse fellow. Three clicks and I had the astrometry. "Cool", I thought but just to make sure that I had another object as backup, I went back to VR0024 image and looked at it again for the second night's position. I found an object moving close to a group of 3 stars but I was not sure. I tried to do astrometry but Pin Point just managed to get one position because the object was close to a lot of stars and the software was unable to get a centroid.
Unable to do much but not wanting to lose the object, I called Roy to take a look again. He said that the objects look the same and that we can try to get astrometry done on another software called Astrometrica, which has better control over the object centroid. After painful attempts, we gave up because the fields were rotated in Pinpoint and Astrometrica and there was no way we could get the astrometry for the second night. I suggested that we can wait for another night and give astrometry for just one asteroid but Roy was not too happy. He sat and calculated the second night's position manually, based on astrometry of nearby stars with a calculator. The astrometry was good because we had one good position already and we just calculated the second position and sent in the report at 2.30pm in the afternoon.
I continued my blinks on the other areas and then came an email. I rushed and opened. Just a conformation that observations have reached. Then Roy called our friend, James McGaha, who is an experienced NEO observer and has a huge observatory in the mountains near Tucson, whom we were planning to visit that night. (People will know James better from the photos he and Tim Hunter clicked. The Messier objects' poster Sky and Telescope sells was their work.) James was giving Roy the directions to come to his place and Roy asked me for a pen. I rushed to the imaging room to grab one and I saw a message flashing in the email. After giving the pen, back I quickly came and opened it. It said
