Minor planets astrometry

Starting with end of 2015 I do also minor planet astrometry using my observatory. Due to the limiting magnitude of my original equipment ( 20cm diameter SCT) I was able to approach mostly usual objects with some exceptions. I hope after the optics upgrade I will be able to have a more important contribution by measuring also more important objects. Still in paralel my old equipment was good enough for some neglected double star astrometry and for some TNO occultations. I use Astrometrica software to reduce the imaged fields , helped by Astrometry.net and Alladin software is special some cases. Also Fitsblink and FindOrb are used currently mostly for analysing quality of my astrometry.

In paralel I work in different EURONEAR projects which are exclusively oriented to the minor planet study, but which are not based on observations from my observatory. A big part of the EURONEAR projects use a datamining approach for minor planet astrometry, photometry and other research activities. The other projects use big profesional telescopes to aquire minor planet images and data.

My collaboration with EURONEAR started long ago somewhere around 2007 with small contributions but it became more and more consistent in time. I contributed there both in datamining projects and obervational projects using images colected on big professional telescopes which were accesed by EURONEAR projects. My contribution was mostly oriented on astrometry but also on developing some datamining tools and some databases needed in the minor planet research made by EURONEAR. Additionaly I’ve took over the system administration of the EURONEAR servers since 2015.

During my involvement in EURONEAR, multiple papers which I’ve participated in have been published in different journals like:  Astronomy&Astrophysics , Astronomische Nachrichten, Astronomy & Computing, MNRAS, Journal of Double Star Observations. Those papers touched subjects like datamining tools and usage, analysing and recovery/precovery of minor planets (mostly NEA and VI) using both datamining and clasical telescope imaging  and other such subjects.

For the list of articles please visit my Research Gate profile here.