Help the Catalina Sky Survey find unreported main-belt and near-Earth asteroids
The Zooniverse project “The Daily Minor Planet” invites you to look through nightly archival images from the Catalina Sky Survey, and scan them for possible new asteroids. You look for objects moving across the field of view from multiple images taken over a short time-span – much like comet and asteroid hunters did with glass plates before the turn of the millennium.
Catalina Sky Survey’s asteroid detection software has systematically identified possible candidates for you to validate – most of these detections are false positives. The project needs you to spot the real asteroids among the data.
The Catalina Sky Survey is a NASA-funded project dedicated to discovering and tracking near-Earth asteroids. Since 1998 they have discovered thousands of near-Earth asteroids and many more main-belt asteroids. They have collected an enormous volume of image data. Although they have state-of-the-art cameras, detection software, and a small team of full-time professional observers, they lack the capacity to identify and verify all objects of interest – that’s where you come in!
Join the project here, and start hunting for asteroids – I already have!
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/fulsdavid/the-daily-minor-planet
