KBO encounters Options

[xtruel]

Hi,

I’m regular follower of NH and I’m also interested in the 2nd leg of the mission, i.e the 2016+ KBOs encounters. Does anyone know when operations about this leg (starting with searching objects of interest with HST or some other earth-based means, I suppose) are expected to begin ?

[john_s]

Here's an update on how the KBO search is going so far.

This year, after several preliminary searches, we are finally kicking off the full-up search campaign. Our searches are possible only near new moon, and so we have obtained a bunch of telescope time once a month, starting with the late April new moon, and continuing in late May (when, by the luck of the draw of the telescope time allocation committees, we have the most time), late June, and late July. Time is divided between the Magellan telescopes in Chile, the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope also on Mauna Kea.

The first run, in late April and early May, on Magellan, went spectacularly well. We had superb weather and seeing (one night's report described "seeing deteriorating to 0.6 arcsec"- if you're an observer you'll know that's an unusual statement), and the data quality looks excellent. We're now in the process of reducing the data- the key step will be the matching and subtraction of pairs of observations taken hours or days apart, so we can remove the gazillion background Milky Way stars and leave behind the moving objects, which will include our potential KBO targets.

In a few weeks we'll be posting subtracted images on a site being developed by our partners at the Galaxy Zoo, where you'll be able help us to search for the moving objects. The late-May data may be the first posted- the late-April run is lower priority because the KBOs are harder to distinguish from asteroids by their motion in April. In the meantime, there's a beta version of the site already available, using data from an earlier (2004) search- I'll post more on that later today, when the site has had a couple more improvements.

John