DISCOVERY OF P/2010 R2 (LA SAGRA) AND THE HIGH-SPEED RAIL

Hello, we would like this time to share the circumstances of this new comet discovery of La Sagra Sky Survey (LSSS), to let friends and observers around to know how do we usually observe in our amateur sky survey and which things happen sometimes.

Yes, all we (not more than 3-4 active involved people) at J75 are amateur, observing with amateur means and with lot of motivation, developing software and hardware tools and enjoying everyday with our projects, and trying to contribute to discover these remaining Small Solar System Stuff (every day with less success…) in front of the impressive good performance of the USA surveys and recently WISE.

I stress the word “amateurs” because we were not awarded with the Edgar Wilson Awards for our last 3 discovered comets along the 2009 year ( P/2009 QG31 (La Sagra), P/2009 T2 (La Sagra), and P/2009 WJ50 (La Sagra) ), and we fear that some people might think we are some kind of Pros. Yes I understand this is not an usual discovery rating for an amateur astronomer and standard equipment, and anyone could suspect that there is a lot of professional means and money after La Sagra Sky Survey. It is just the contrary.

La Sagra Sky Survey "observes" by means of 3 telescopes of 45 cms and commercial Sbig 11000 CCD cameras, two of the telescopes were kindly lent by Bill Yeung, yes who won the Edgar Wilson in 2002, discovering P/2002 BV with exactly the same telescope but 8 years before from MPC 333.

Starting in 1995 observing minor planets from Mallorca MPC 620, we made the effort to move the observatory to a better skies, due to the high humidity and the increasing light pollution of the island. La Sagra mountain, in Andaluzia, South of Spain, was the good place we always dreamed to develop our amateur project. We have rented a land there and we bought another 45 cms telescope similar to the two telescopes lent by Bill, and started routinely observations in 2008. The observers (currently not many) are working remotely from home, office, trains, everywhere…

In La Sagra there is only Miguel, a nice guy who spends there alone in the mountain for almost 23 days a month, helping us for the maintenance and security, but every day is getting more and more experienced observing too. The need to develop a full remote survey was the only option for us when we moved the observatory there, because we are busy all the day in our professional jobs hundred of kilometers away. The first remote concern was to be able to control the telescopes through web internet pages, this was an old matter already solved on the telescopes placed in Mallorca in 2002. Remote controlling the slewing, focusing, taking images, downloading them, etc …, Nowadays this remote manual procedure is almost never performed, since the telescopes in La Sagra usually work alone the full night after they are locally or remotely started after few clicks, once the tasks containing the selected sky areas to search the following night are edited and sent via FTP by the remote observers.

As we are now producing lot of CCD images every night, is completely impossible to download them and to try to reduce at home, and even less with the required small delay after they are being taken, so we also developed the reduction software which is working “there” at the observatory almost in real-time as the observation runs, searching for movers. When a new object candidate is found on the images, the software creates small windows around it (we call “croppies” to them) containing the object, and these croppies are being auto added to a “nightly growing” webpage, allowing to check them by us from home, office, train..(hmm… again the train.. what the heck with the train…), sometimes along the same night, if we don’t need to go to work very early the next morning, sometimes at lunch time, before going back to work in the afternoon. We almost never see or blink the full FOV images remotely.

Observing like that, our 2009 year was quite productive, around 2380 Asteroid discoveries, from them 15 NEOs, the 3 mentioned comets and around 595.000 measurements.

2010 started, and due particularly to the extreme bad weather conditions this year, but also the new discovery rules and the increase of the USA survey efficiency, WISE etc, all that broke our statistics…, fortunately it is only an amateur enterprise …, :-) and honestly I think we can’t do it much better with the current equipement: CCD cameras that are reading-out for 1 min (thus we are really observing only 3-4 hours for each 6 of darkness), and with these small 45cms apertures. Logically we might be close to the end, we have no budget and almost nobody helped us so far there, (what kind of help should we expect if we are only simple amateurs… !) , Thus, meanwhile we enjoy, we are already experiencing the next observational field. Moreover lately this year has been somehow disappointing for us: The last 3 NEOCPs objects we found and reported last month took exactly the same end, were finally linked to old one opposition recovered “lost NEO objects”… wow ! this is very good!, to recover such objects, but somehow also “disapointing” when certainly we are not discovering NEOS all the time. : -)

Now you already know what a “croppy” is and how we remotely check them, I go on the discovery circumstances of P/2010 R2 (LA SAGRA):

Last Sep. 14th I arrived home (Barcelona) late in the evening, after work, and as almost every evening, I checked through internet the meteo conditions at La Sagra and contacted Miguel to ask him if it was worth to start to observe, since the clouds were reaching La Sagra in short time. As the darkrun was (is) finishing and most of the ecliptical sky was already covered and re-covered several times by the big surveys and a little bit also by us, I suggested to him to try to observe until was getting cloudy, and that he could choose and edit the sky areas he liked preferably better “far” from the ecliptic, at high declinations.

I went to sleep after starting remotely the reduction program… at 8 am, before going to work I checked, as almost every morning the auto-edited croppies on the webpages and the reduction data produced the night before…. hmm .. bad night, low magnitudes reached, only 3 apparently new objects, a bunch of known ones detected... and…. what else to expect under such partially cloudy conditions at high declinations...? Only these apparently 3 new objects croppied...

Obviously the auto-edited croppies are only created over the supposed new objects, once the detections are checked against the known population, on the contrary we would be collecting thousands of them every night, The astrometry of these “rejected” known ones is going directly to increase a long astrometry batch for report it as incidental astrometry.

I went to work. At noon, I tried to check these 3 supposed new objects against the MPChecker (currently it is very often that they finally belong to a surrounding “V” or 1 day arc WISE designation from 2 months ago… :-), …,hmmm Very odd, this time all 3 could be “new”, but … almost sure should exist some ONS for them.. who knows…..

Looking the croppies of these objects, 09EB109 was a little bit more blurred than usual. It is really difficult to notice this if you are not very used to check many and many of such croppies, and even harder on "CENTU2" (telescope number2, this is from Bill) which usually gets more blurred stellar images than the other 2 telescopes.

See if you want to try, on the screenshot of the next croppy.. who could assess this as a comet…. ? On the bottom left corner there is a dimmer star just over the SNR, also very blurred. The croppies are forced to this high contrast. The motion speed and PA was completely similar to a typical MB.

On 15th in the evening and after finishing the work in Barcelona I took the train to go to Lerida city, (160 kms away from Barcelona). I usually work in Lerida only for 2 days a month, and I love and take a High-Speed Rail called AVE which is linking Barcelona and Madrid (650kms in about 2.30h). Some of these trains are direct, few others are stopping in other smaller cities as Lerida in the course to Madrid. This high-speed train has sunk since two years ago the traditional very busy and crowded flight connection so called “Madrid-Barcelona air-bridge” between the 2 most important cities of Spain.

I take this rail not only for go to Lerida two times a month, but every week, since my couple lives in Madrid and I go and live there for the weekends. This train is relaxing, comfortable, punctual, not affected by the bad weather, with a nice table and the most important: possibility to Internet connection and, thanks to that, compared with the plane, helps to take free time for our remote survey: many of the scheduled observations, sometimes the observation itself, the reduction of the data, the reported astrometry to MPC which I contribute ( when I’m who takes care on that) is done from “here” (I’m in the train again right now) , with my laptop and the wireless internet connection at 300kms/hour in the course of the 2h.30 min trip to Madrid

These trains named AVE are the Siemens 103 serie, Velaro E see the pic.

As we had no other interesting objects to check the following night… apart of these 3, I told Miguel from the train and thought Skype, to take a try on 09EB109 at the beginning of the night.. adding - “when I´m tonight in Lerida I will check the images”.

Miguel took 9 images of 90 sec. When I arrived to Lerida it was already cloudy at La Sagra and we decided to not start the survey observations. As these observations were apparently not very interesting, and were done only because the very remote possibility to be a comet (see again the pic with the croppies), and we were tired, we went directly to bed, I think we even forgot to check them... Next day Thursday 16 I had a hard working day in Lerida. I made a break for 1 hour at lunch time, and I opened the laptop, reading the incoming emails and remembered the 9 images taken last night. I started to download them… - “oh shit” - the Internet connection with the observatory went down just when I had downloaded only 3. (this lately happens because we have almost no batteries on the wireless antenna which bounces the internet connection to the observatory, because a solar panel is broken) , I started to blink the 3 images ( I said before that we never do download-blink but this time was for checking its possible cometary shape).. and again… -“shit !!, this seems certainly a comet !!” , and suddenly I realized that it was too late and needed to go to work again… I took the laptop with me. Now is time to tell about my job.. I’m a medical doctor and some years later I also graduated in odontology, and my daily pro work is the oral surgery, mostly removing wisdom teeth and inserting implants in the jaws..and such things…. arggg what a pain!. 

I had connected my laptop in the theatre, all the afternoon, removing the globes continuously in between the surgeries and the appointments, meanwhile waiting for the anesthetics…, blinking these 3 images several times, to be sure, reducing the astrometry and reporting it to MPC and CBAT.

After that restless afternoon-evening…, poor patients, I hope they feel good today !!, I went fast to the train back to Barcelona, There, and again at 300kms/h I checked the sky coverage plot, being aware and almost sure that MPC would already have ONS observations of such object from the big surveys.. even I noticed that 703 CATALINA searched over the same sky region the night before! again a - "shit.....- The new MPC rules sure will f…k us here again - I thought, despite the two nights and the cometary reported appearance. (This was too much for this year…) just then I got a message from Brian Marsden telling me that the object was linked but also with ONS reported by us the month before !!!. I went fast to the NEOCP, the object was there, with our astrometry, reported along the day, just after the 703 Catalina measurements, of course they detected it !!, but the first 3 measurements on the top were the ones linked from August 12 !! and they were coming from our own ONS from August… this was the most !!. It is very common to find such linkages from the big surveys, because they generate lots of ONS, but not very frequent coming from our own observations of the previous month!, And WISE… ? sure didn’t observe it either ?, it had no monsoon out there!. was my following concern.

B. Marsden suggested us to check our old temporal designation croppy from August 08CC085… I went to check the old croppies remotely by means of the "search mover engine tool", but the internet connection from the train at 300kms/h with La Sagra server was still down due to the broken solar panel there, and if wind was not blowing soon again there… (also we have the air generator) we would need to wait too much …

Already at home in Barcelona I could finally go inside the La Sagra server and check the croppy of the object found during August, 08CC085, on which we appreciate even less cometary appearance…. Look at this next croppy and compare with the sourronding stars. (This time was "CENTU3" the dark duck... which found it)

Also I could download the remaining 4-9 images we took the previous night and then we saw it much better:

 

More observations were added meanwhile to the NEOCP page… I saw that J95 Peter Birtwhistle reported measurements and I wanted to ask privately if he was seeing something special… I was sure Peter, “saw it”, first because “no filter was added” to his NEOCP observation and because, as very experienced observed he is, sure searched inside the object trying to detect any cometary feature, considering the object was on the NEOCP with certainly no NEO like orbit… he confirmed it to us.

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed with observations, to the people who publicly or privately congratulated us, and to all our team for the big effort they (we) do every day, not always things go bad… this time even we were very lucky finding the object one month before, and who knows, maybe next year we could win the Edgar Wilson Award for that one.

Now 17, Friday, again in the train at 300kms/h… arriving to Madrid, for the weekend. Tonight will be cloudy at La Sagra, so I took my time for write all that...

Jaime,

http://www.oam.es/
http://www.minorplanets.org/OLS/LSSS.html