Discovering Novae/Supernovae and Asteroids

If you do regular observing sooner or later you are going to come across an object in your field of view which wasn’t there last time you looked. You have discovered an new object. Here is a story of one such discovery by a variable star observer.

Shawn Dvorak wrote:

I just came in from a short viewing session (moon and clouds tonight). One of my targets was X Leo, which is in outburst, by the way. When I first glanced at the field I thought I was looking at the wrong 6m star because there were two 12 mag stars close-by to the north. I thought the first might be X Leo in outburst, but what was the other? A quick check at other stars in the field showed that I was looking at the right place, but there was still that anomalous star. I carefully estimated its brightness and position and moved on to get some other objects before moonrise.

I came in and excitedly brought up Guide by ProjectPluto. My "Eureka!" soon became "oh well" when I displayed the field for X Leo and found that I had just "discovered" asteroid 19 Fortuna only 150 years too late. So much for my shot at fame, but thank heavens for modern tools like Guide that can instantly resolve questions like this.

The Minor Planet Center has a tool online which will help you determine if the object you are seeing is a known minor planet.

Simply input the coordinates (or the NGC number of the galaxy since it was originally used for Supernova hunters) where you are observing and it will tell you of any known minor planets within your field of view. I would suggest using this online tool instead of your planetarium software because if you are using old orbital elements, your program may not show the proper location of these bodies.

This tool may be found at:

http://cfaps8.harvard.edu/~cgi/CheckSN.COM

(BTW, you can download current elements for every know asteroid and comet on the MPC's site in a format compatible for most popular planetarium programs)

Happy hunting!
Richard Kowalski

Quail Hollow Observatory
Minor Planet Mailing List

http://www.bitnik.com/QHO
http://www.bitnik.com/mp

761 Zephyrhills
7392 Kowalski

Submitted by Brian Fraser